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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   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 29 2018, @11:24AM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday January 29 2018, @11:24AM (#629776) Journal
    If I were designing a new CPU now, to be fast and not have to run any legacy software, it would have a large number of simple in-order cores, multiple register contexts, hardware-managed thread switching (pool of hardware-managed thread contexts spilled to memory), hardware inter-thread message passing, young-generation garbage collection integrated with the cache, and a cache-cohernecy protocol without an exclusive state (no support for multiple cores having access to the same mutable data), and a stack-based instruction set (denser instructions and no need to care about ILP because we don't try to do any).

    We could build such a thing today and it would both be immune to Spectre-like attacks and have a factor of 2-10 faster overall throughput than any current CPU with a similar transistor budget and process. It would suck for running C code, but a low-level language with an abstract machine closer to Erlang would be incredibly fast.

    We've invested billions in compiler and architecture R&D to let programmers pretend that they're still using a fast PDP-11. That probably needs to stop soon.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 29 2018, @02:08PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday January 29 2018, @02:08PM (#629802)

    We've invested billions in compiler and architecture R&D

    I'm pretty sure that number is in the trillions by now... inertia is a remarkably powerful thing, just witness the staying power of DOS/Windows - sure there are alternatives, there always have been, but as far as market dominance goes we're past 30 years now.

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