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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/
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 29 2018, @11:29AM (1 child)
This is only kind-of true. The thing that's changed in the last 3-4 years is that new process technologies are not bringing down the cost of transistors. The other part of Moore's law is that the dollar investment is constant: the number of transistors on a chip that you can buy for a fixed amount doubles every 18 months. With the last couple of process advances, the cost per transistor has gone up.
It used to be that for large volume runs, you always wanted the newest generation. It might have higher up-front costs and a higher cost more per wafer, but the cost per chip would go down because the amortised cost per transistor was lower. That's no longer the case: even for enormous runs where the fixed costs are negligible when amortised across the entire run, the cost per wafer has gone up by enough that the cost per chip has also gone up. Oh, and those fixed costs have gone up by a lot, so for smaller runs this is even worse.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 29 2018, @12:11PM
Intel disputes that cost per transistor is not going down:
Intel: Our 10-nanometer chips will cost 30% less than the competition’s [venturebeat.com]
Intel’s 10 nm Technology: Delivering the Highest Logic Transistor Density in the Industry Through the Use of Hyper Scaling [intel.com]
Everybody is creating their latest generations of chips without using EUV. Once EUV is working at the right scale, that will drive cost down some more. It could even be useful in the scenario where we completely stall out in terms of improvements with no more shrinking, because it could still lower the cost. As for 450mm wafers [eetimes.com]:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]