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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday January 28 2018, @11:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the RIP dept.

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Hammered by the finance of physics and the weaponisation of optimisation, Moore's Law has hit the wall, bounced off - and reversed direction. We're driving backwards now: all things IT will become slower, harder and more expensive.

That doesn't mean there won't some rare wins - GPUs and other dedicated hardware have a bit more life left in them. But for the mainstay of IT, general purpose computing, last month may be as good as it ever gets.

Going forward, the game changes from "cheaper and faster" to "sleeker and wiser". Software optimisations - despite their Spectre-like risks - will take the lead over the next decades, as Moore's Law fades into a dimly remembered age when the cornucopia of process engineering gave us everything we ever wanted.

From here on in, we're going to have to work for it.

It's well past the time that we move from improving performance by increasing clock speeds and transistor counts; it's been time to move on to increasing performance wherever possible by writing better parallel processing code.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/24/death_notice_for_moores_law/


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  • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Sunday January 28 2018, @01:50PM (1 child)

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 28 2018, @01:50PM (#629436)

    > Wonder if there was some similar "law" cited with the advent of reinforced concrete, and high rise buldings?

    Not sure, but it is not dissimilar - concrete keeps getting better and buildings keep getting taller, but the concrete is not the limiting factor, wind loading becomes your problem, and when better simulation and design sort of solved that, you run into limits because you cannot fit enough elevators into a building core to move the people from floor to floor in acceptable time and still retain any usable building outside the elevator shafts. Tallest (probably) building under construction is now a cable-stayed monster in dubai which solves the elevator issue by omitting most of the lower floors, it's basically a smaller skyscraper up in the air on a concrete stick.

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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday January 28 2018, @03:56PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 28 2018, @03:56PM (#629479) Homepage Journal

    Once again, it's an interconnect problem. Now if we just interconnected all those buildings at the 30th storey...