5 ms·

The end of Moore's Law will have profound effects on the entire technology industry. What happens when computers stop getting faster? There's no obvious succe

• eru 12y ago
  Moore's Law is not about speed per se. It's about transistor count on the chip that is cheapest per transistor. (If memory serves right.)
  • boyaka 12y ago
    The reason Moore's law worked so well is largely because of this. When we began creating transistors on integrated circuits, the only thing preventing us from making them exactly as small as they are today were things like cost and the capabilities of fabs to make them reliable and stable. So ever since we started making them we've stepped down the size by about half, rather than something smaller that would be more difficult and expensive to make. The entire manufacturing industry gradually became more efficient, increasing reliability and reducing the cost of fabricating the integrated circuits. The history of performance speedup hasn't been solely due to doubling the transistors. Other types of architectural improvements in memory, buses, parallelism, multiple cores/threads have yielded performance doubling or more. Memory access has always been a huge latency and there are lots of ways to improve that without just making the transistors smaller. We have a lot of work to do still! The majority of our computing has been on the x86 architecture, which basically stems from the 8080 which was designed in the mid 70s. We can still discover new and better architectures and materials. It's just the standard shrinkage of IC's that was the basis of Moore's Law originally has reached its limits.
  • wmf 12y ago
    That's also ending, as transistors will not get cheaper and chips will probably not get larger in the future.
• tedsanders 12y ago
  I envision competition between a few forces: (1) As the ROI on R&D falls, R&D will be drastically cut and the industry will become even more commoditized. Less R&D spending means chips get cheaper. (2) Capital equipment will last longer because it won't need to be replaced with new versions every couple years. Fewer equipment purchases means chips get cheaper. (3) As performance/$ wanes, demand will fall in the short term. At first prices may crash if capacity is overbuilt, but in the medium term, production will stabilize at a smaller level than before. Because of economies of scale, prices will be higher at this smaller scale. (I believe this is what happened to the RAM market a few years ago.) This force may cause chip prices to rise. (4) As software continues to improve, the value of chips will rise, even as the chips themselves stagnate. This will cause the market to grow, and economies of scale will drive prices down. (5) As has been happening for years, the industry will continue to consolidate. Less competition between producers will mean higher profit margins and higher prices. Overall, (1), (2), and (4) will lower chip prices and (3) and (5) will raise chip prices. But I think the overall trend will be lower prices, though perhaps not as the drastic rate to which we've become accustomed.
  • weland 12y ago
    > As software continues to improve That's a fairly big assumption.
• dsuth 12y ago
  Software optimisation will become important again.
  • islon 12y ago
    What do you mean "again"?
    • saltvedt 12y ago
      It doesn't seem to be important now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
    • bane 12y ago
      Even if you make particularly efficient code, the giant tower of abstractions we all operate on top of make running your code dozens of times slower than it could possibly be running on bare metal.
  • mikepurvis 12y ago
    The most interesting piece of this puzzle to me is initiatives like MirageOS, which let you run your application very close to the metal—you give up a lot of convenience when you dump the traditional OS, but you give up a lot of inefficiency, too.
    • wmf 12y ago
      Or you could keep the convenience while dumping the overhead by using Docker. As a bonus you also get to be cool.
      • mikepurvis 12y ago
        Docker is still a full Linux kernel. The point of MirageOS is that your app is the kernel.
        • eru 12y ago
• annnnd 12y ago
  > What happens when computers stop getting faster? Software will have to stop getting slower. >;-)
• agumonkey 12y ago
  Decrease in progress in CMOS will diffuse as pressure in other areas, new materials, new techniques, new structures, new software paradigms... or maybe just different usage. Do we really need that much computing power ? It's slightly ranty but not entirely. First spreadsheets were used to fit in 64k. For the average user an old laptop would do fine, in that area progress is self fulfilling marketing prophecy. For enterprises .. maybe (the few I worked at had very low grade network and database infrastructure, so opportunity to evolve) Hard science and medicine, they deserve smart and fast tech.