SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the all-good-thigns-must-come-to-an-end dept.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
After more than 50 years of miniaturization, the transistor could stop shrinking in just five years. That is the prediction of the 2015 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which was officially released earlier this month.
After 2021, the report forecasts, it will no longer be economically desirable for companies to continue to shrink the dimensions of transistors in microprocessors. Instead, chip manufacturers will turn to other means of boosting density, namely turning the transistor from a horizontal to a vertical geometry and building multiple layers of circuitry, one on top of another.
For some, this change will likely be interpreted as another death knell for Moore's Law, the repeated doubling of transistor densities that has given us the extraordinarily capable computers we have today. Compounding the drama is the fact that this is the last ITRS roadmap, the end to a more-than-20-year-old coordinated planning effort that began in the United States and was then expanded to include the rest of the world.
[...]
This final ITRS report is titled ITRS 2.0. The name reflects the idea that improvements in computing are no longer driven from the bottom-up, by tinier switches and denser or faster memories. Instead, it takes a more top-down approach, focusing on the applications that now drive chip design, such as data centers, the Internet of Things, and mobile gadgets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 26 2016, @04:24PM
Naturally everything can be taken to an extreme, but as a general statement I would agree with the statement that "computers are fast and processing time is cheap."
As a general statement, I would rather have some easy-to-understand code that is 20% slower than a spaghetti code which only Linus Torvalds can understand that is 20% faster. If you consider the price of 1 day of programmer time versus the cost of adding 1 CPU over the course of the year, it frequently makes business sense too.
of course it can be taken to the extreme. Water is good, but you can drown with too much of it. That's just a good first cut for how to weigh the scales. If things are terrible (like the example you gave), then fix it. However, what was that quote? "Premature optimization is the root of all evil?"