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Moore's law is not decelerating - transistor density is doubling on schedule, with process shrinks happening like clockwork. Smartphone performance has actually

by 6ren 14y ago

Moore's law is not decelerating - transistor density is doubling on schedule, with process shrinks happening like clockwork. Smartphone performance has actually been doubling yearly - better than Moore's Law. If there are fewer transistors, it's because we haven't worked out how to use them effectively; or they aren't demanded by customers. If not in demand, other ways of improving performance won't be in demand. It's this pattern of improvements overshooting demand that Clayton Christensen wrote about.

zanny 14y ago
People think inverse Moores Law is slowing with Intel, but Intel has just been committing more and more die in their chips to onboard graphics. I wonder how Ivy Bridge E will perform with 435mm wafers, though Sandy Bridge E was kind of a let down (I'd imagine that is more architecture shortfalls with 1/4 the cores shut off). But yeah, consumer demand just mandates something that can run a web browser as fast as IO bandwidth allows. You don't even really need video decoding since you can offload that to hardware acceleration. People should realize we are at another threshold with Moores law - in a few years we should have transistor density high enough (I'd imagine during the CPU 14nm era) to be able to embed a full compute environment (I'd imagine a dual core Cortex a15) with a gig of ram and the necessary chipset fixings for an integrated wireless AC NIC that is the size of a penny, maybe off one fab line, maybe even integrated on one die. Full computers with 500mbit wireless spectrum bandwidth to be able to stream off video, printers, data, etc in parallel. Probably runs on a watt or two too. You could probably run that off solar. Think about it - you could have traffic cameras doing realtime video analysis processing on solar power. Solar-powered wireless routers you can just glue on top of lamp posts run by the sun. You could have a full computer that you wear, powered by the kinematic energy of motion or maybe a novel heat leech tech to utilize ambient body heat. And you think phones were a big deal! I wouldn't be surprised if we could do something similar with a single core Cortex a9 (maybe around 600mhz) with 128mb of ram and 802.11b (maybe even g or n) right now in a similar power package (maybe 4 - 5 watts).
- sbierwagen 14y ago
  Solar-powered wireless routers you can just glue on top of lamp posts run by the sun. Stross, Doctorow. "Unwirer" (2003) She handed him the Motorola batarang he'd glimpsed earlier. The underside had a waxed-paper peel-off strip and when he lifted a corner, his thumb stuck so hard to the tackiness beneath that he lost the top layer of skin when he pulled it loose. He turned it over in his hands. "How's it powered?" "Dirt-cheap photovoltaics charging a polymer cell -- they're printed in layers, the entire case is a slab of battery plus solar cell. It doesn't draw too many amps, only sucks juice when it's transmitting. Put one in a subway car and you've got an instant ad-hoc network that everyone in the car can use. Put one in the next car and they'll mesh."

by 6ren 14y ago

zanny 14y ago

People think inverse Moores Law is slowing with Intel, but Intel has just been committing more and more die in their chips to onboard graphics. I wonder how Ivy Bridge E will perform with 435mm wafers, though Sandy Bridge E was kind of a let down (I'd imagine that is more architecture shortfalls with 1/4 the cores shut off). But yeah, consumer demand just mandates something that can run a web browser as fast as IO bandwidth allows. You don't even really need video decoding since you can offload that to hardware acceleration. People should realize we are at another threshold with Moores law - in a few years we should have transistor density high enough (I'd imagine during the CPU 14nm era) to be able to embed a full compute environment (I'd imagine a dual core Cortex a15) with a gig of ram and the necessary chipset fixings for an integrated wireless AC NIC that is the size of a penny, maybe off one fab line, maybe even integrated on one die. Full computers with 500mbit wireless spectrum bandwidth to be able to stream off video, printers, data, etc in parallel. Probably runs on a watt or two too. You could probably run that off solar. Think about it - you could have traffic cameras doing realtime video analysis processing on solar power. Solar-powered wireless routers you can just glue on top of lamp posts run by the sun. You could have a full computer that you wear, powered by the kinematic energy of motion or maybe a novel heat leech tech to utilize ambient body heat. And you think phones were a big deal! I wouldn't be surprised if we could do something similar with a single core Cortex a9 (maybe around 600mhz) with 128mb of ram and 802.11b (maybe even g or n) right now in a similar power package (maybe 4 - 5 watts).

sbierwagen 14y ago
Solar-powered wireless routers you can just glue on top of lamp posts run by the sun. Stross, Doctorow. "Unwirer" (2003) She handed him the Motorola batarang he'd glimpsed earlier. The underside had a waxed-paper peel-off strip and when he lifted a corner, his thumb stuck so hard to the tackiness beneath that he lost the top layer of skin when he pulled it loose. He turned it over in his hands. "How's it powered?" "Dirt-cheap photovoltaics charging a polymer cell -- they're printed in layers, the entire case is a slab of battery plus solar cell. It doesn't draw too many amps, only sucks juice when it's transmitting. Put one in a subway car and you've got an instant ad-hoc network that everyone in the car can use. Put one in the next car and they'll mesh."