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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: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 28 2018, @02:25PM (2 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday January 28 2018, @02:25PM (#629450) Journal

    All the stuff being done by the CPU has more implications than just speed. If the code runs on the main CPU, any vulnerabilities are ways to compromise the computer. With dedicated hardware, all you would get access to by exploiting bugs in it would be that hardware.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @10:21PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @10:21PM (#629610)

    and all memory you mean, since the hardware designers never bothered to compartmentalize or put security in. Just look at firewire. Heck, just look at meltdown, just letting an unpriviledged process read kernel memory "I'm sure we can fix it up later well enough".
    That few people bothered to exploit dedicated hardware doesn't mean they had any fewer security issues. It usually means it's harder to do and it would affect fewer people. That doesn't make it a solution at all.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday January 29 2018, @05:18AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday January 29 2018, @05:18AM (#629705) Journal

      I don't see how hacking a modem hanging on the serial port would in any way allow to compromise your computer. Unless there's an additional vulnerability in the serial driver that the attacker can exploit, of course. But that's a further line that has to be broken. Remember, security is not an absolute; there is no "secure", there is only "less secure" and "more secure".

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.