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Death Notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

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

MrPlow writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:Still, talking about performance... Re:Still, talking about performance... (Score: 2, Interesting) by AlphaSnail on Sunday January 28 2018, @07:36PM (1 child)

  by AlphaSnail (5814) on Sunday January 28 2018, @07:36PM (#629549)

  I have this feeling which might be wrong but I suspect this AI phenomena at some point is going to be turned toward translating code into more optimized and parallel functionality like some kind of super compiler. I see no reason that we couldn't hit a point where software isn't typed out like it is now but written by some kind of Siri like assistant that converses with you until the program is running as you describe it rather than working out every line of code yourself. At that point how good a coder is will be a concept like how good a switchboard operator is, irrelevant having been replaced by a superior technique. After that people might code for fun but it wont be used by any businesses or for profit entities. Why it might be a while until that happens is it would be coders putting themselves out of a job, and I think they are going to hold off on that for as long as possible but I think it is inevitable since whoever does it first will have such an advantage once the cats out of the bag they will dominate the software industry in every respect on cost and quality.

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• Re:Still, talking about performance... (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 29 2018, @11:32AM

  by TheRaven (270) on Monday January 29 2018, @11:32AM (#629779) Journal

  AI is not magic. AI is a good way of getting a half-arsed solution to a problem that you don't understand, as long as that problem doesn't exist in a solution space that has too many local minima. Pretty much none of that applies to software development, and especially not to optimisation. We already have a bunch of optimisation techniques that we're not using because they're too computationally expensive to be worth it (i.e. the compiler will spend hours or days per compilation unit to get you an extra 10-50% performance). AI lets us do the same thing, only slower.

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  sudo mod me up

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