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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: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 28 2018, @05:45PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 28 2018, @05:45PM (#629515) Journal
    The computing power thrown at Bitcoin dwarfs any of that though it's pure integer logic math. According to here [bitcoincharts.com], the Bitcoin network is currently computing almost 8 million terahashes per second. A hash is apparently fixed in computation to about 1350 arithmetic logic unit operations [bitcointalk.org] per second ("ALU ops") presently, but not floating point operations. So the Bitcoin network is cranking out about 10*21 arithmetic operations per second - 10 million petaALU ops.