Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @01:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the need-more-more-moore dept.

IEEE is running a special report on "50 Years of Moore's Law" that considers "the gift that keeps on giving" from different points of view. Chris Mack begins by arguing that nothing about Moore’s Law was inevitable. "Instead, it’s a testament to hard work, human ingenuity, and the incentives of a free market. Moore’s prediction may have started out as a fairly simple observation of a young industry. But over time it became an expectation and self-fulfilling prophecy—an ongoing act of creation by engineers and companies that saw the benefits of Moore’s Law and did their best to keep it going, or else risk falling behind the competition."

Andrew Huang argues that Moore's Law is slowing and will someday stop but the death of Moore's Law will spur innovation. "Someday in the foreseeable future, you will not be able to buy a better computer next year," writes Huang. "Under such a regime, you’ll probably want to purchase things that are more nicely made to begin with. The idea of an “heirloom laptop” may sound preposterous today, but someday we may perceive our computers as cherished and useful looms to hand down to our children, much as some people today regard wristwatches or antique furniture."

Vaclav Smil writes about "Moore's Curse" and argues that there is a dark side to the revolution in electronics for it has had the unintended effect of raising expectations for technical progress. "We are assured that rapid progress will soon bring self-driving electric cars, hypersonic airplanes, individually tailored cancer cures, and instant three-dimensional printing of hearts and kidneys. We are even told it will pave the world’s transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies," writes Smil. "But the doubling time for transistor density is no guide to technical progress generally. Modern life depends on many processes that improve rather slowly, not least the production of food and energy and the transportation of people and goods."

Finally Cyrus Mody writes that it seems clear that Moore’s Law is not a law of nature in any commonly accepted sense but what kind of thing is Moore’s Law? "Moore’s Law is a human construct. As with legislation, though, most of us have little and only indirect say in its construction," writes Mody. "Everyone, both the producers and consumers of microelectronics, takes steps needed to maintain Moore’s Law, yet everyone’s experience is that they are subject to it."

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Wednesday April 15 2015, @01:53PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday April 15 2015, @01:53PM (#170957) Journal

    Not even look and feel...Flash used to run fine but was a huge CPU hog on a 2GHz single core Pentium with one gig of RAM. Today it's a huge CPU hog on a 2.8GHz quad core i7 with 14 gigs of RAM. And the "look and feel" is identical.

    I recently started playing with cpulimit and found I can crank it WAAAAY down on my browsers without *any* noticeable performance hit. Less so when using Flash, but even then I can still make some reductions. So...what's it doing with all those extra cycles? I think mostly it's just a lot of AJAX-y crap in the Javascript that refreshes way more often than it needs to. Which nobody notices because they only test if some eight core workstation can handle loading their one single website, rather than real-world use cases where you'd want a number of tabs open, a few other programs running, and all on a cheaper system to begin with.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3