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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."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday April 15 2015, @09:11PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 15 2015, @09:11PM (#171183) Homepage Journal

    A specific problem with OpenOffice on my mom's imac, is that if I grab the resize box with my mouse then move it around rapidly, the entire window lags behind by more than an inch. Imagine a physical window that was on the end of a rubber band, delayed by its momentum.

    I expect that's because every single GUI widget is repeatedly re-rendered. What could be done instead is, during times when responsiveness is critical, to cache the widget pixels then render them from the caches. I've thought of doing just this myself for OpenOffice, but I have a lot on my plate.

    Back in the day we used to do a lot of caching like that. Nowadays it's not done so much.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
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