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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @01:56PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @01:56PM (#629800)

    I wonder how that performs against SIGSTOP/SIGCONT toggled by temperature treshold, an approach I sometimes use myself. At least my variation is looking at the relevant variable. Of course on the other hand you might get wildly fluctuating temperatures if you set the cut off and start again limits widely apart. And then there is the fact that some things will crash on you with STOP/CONT, empirical observation.

    I personally think that distributed computing (from a home users perspective) stopped making sense after CPUs learned to slow down and sleep instead of "furiously doing nothing at 100% blast". But hey if you want to help cure cancer or map the skies or design a new stealth bomber on your dime be my guest.

  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday January 29 2018, @04:30PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 29 2018, @04:30PM (#629859) Journal

    my variation is looking at the relevant variable [temperature threshold].

    I have a separate daemon watching temperature and scaling CPU frequency and/or governor to moderate it (though usually that only comes into play if there is a cooling problem; I have one host that would simply cook itself without it though). I have cpulimit jobs in cron that indicate ~full blast while I am usually in bed asleep, and limited to a fair minority share during the workday (with conky on the desktop telling me the status). I have admittedly probably spent too much time on this, but it's a hobby. Although when people ask if I have hobbies and I say "server administration" I always get odd stares until I say "and playing guitar"