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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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @12:29PM (10 children)
Repeat after me: Moore's law is talking about transistor count, it says absolutely nothing about performance.
Therefore, it is not impacted in any way whatsoever by performance drops due to Spectre/Meltdown.
Of course, we may be nearing "the end" of increasing transistor density as well, if only due to laws of physics, but you'll forgive me if I decide to wait for it to actually stop before I start singing requiems. The doom-sayers have been crying about imminent death of Moore's law since, I dunno, May 1965 I guess.
The "Death notice 2 January 2018" is just ridiculous clickbait written without even a cursory glance at the Wikipedia article about Moore's law [wikipedia.org], let alone understanding any of it. Literally, the first sentence is "Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years."
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 28 2018, @12:45PM (5 children)
Well, actually, Moore's law isn't exactly a law. Moore simply commented on a phenomenon, which is temporary. At some point in time, we will reach molecule, then atom sized transistors, and only so many will fit where we want to put them. The time it takes to double the number of transisters, and thus performance and efficiency, will begin to take longer, then longer, and eventually, they'll just give up on Moore. Incremental improvements in a lifetime will be the norm.
Wonder if there was some similar "law" cited with the advent of reinforced concrete, and high rise buldings? "At the pace that construction is improving, we'll all be living in skyscraping towers in the next century!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @01:06PM (1 child)
> Well, actually, Moore's law isn't exactly a law. Moore simply commented on a phenomenon, which is temporary.
Well, yeah, I know, I never argued otherwise. It's also in the first sentence from Wikipedia I mentioned ("Moore's law is the observation that...").
I'm saying that the core premise of TFA is complete bullshit. Might as well use Spectre/Meltdown to announce the deaths of the Sturgeon's law [wikipedia.org] and the Hofstadter's law [wikipedia.org]. It's just as relevant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @02:00PM
Not a death announcement, but rather a textbook confirmation of Hofstadter's law.
It is going to take a bit longer than expected to get the next speedup.
This is because the planning did not account for having to stop and backup and adjust for an unaccounted use case.
Kind of the whole point of scheduling complexity being complex.
Moore's law is a simple equation. It may need another term to account for approaching the limits of the current bags of tricks.
It seems likely that another bag will be found. Perhaps 3d?
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Sunday January 28 2018, @01:50PM (1 child)
> Wonder if there was some similar "law" cited with the advent of reinforced concrete, and high rise buldings?
Not sure, but it is not dissimilar - concrete keeps getting better and buildings keep getting taller, but the concrete is not the limiting factor, wind loading becomes your problem, and when better simulation and design sort of solved that, you run into limits because you cannot fit enough elevators into a building core to move the people from floor to floor in acceptable time and still retain any usable building outside the elevator shafts. Tallest (probably) building under construction is now a cable-stayed monster in dubai which solves the elevator issue by omitting most of the lower floors, it's basically a smaller skyscraper up in the air on a concrete stick.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday January 28 2018, @03:56PM
Once again, it's an interconnect problem. Now if we just interconnected all those buildings at the 30th storey...
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Sunday January 28 2018, @02:03PM
Murphy's law isn't exactly a law either. But, boy, does it happen or does it happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 28 2018, @02:07PM
Moore's law has been (mis)applied by the tech press to everything from transistor count, to clock frequency, storage density, performance per dollar, performance per watt, and anything else that makes rapid progress.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Sunday January 28 2018, @02:25PM (1 child)
The fake news in CPUs is the *name* of the processes. Nothing in a 14um chip is 14nm in size, or in distance from anything else. Nothing in a 10nm chip is 10nm in size, or in distance from anything else. Nothing in a 7nm chip is 7nm in size, or in distance from anything else. Worst - nothing in a 7nm chip is half the size of what it was in a 14nm chip (it's no longer a linear relationship that's being followed, it's more square rooty). Modern "nm" make bogomips look something from the SI units' definitions.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @02:15PM
So where does the name from from then? Marketing dept?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday January 28 2018, @06:40PM
Sorry, but this is just about the time that the death of Moore's law was predicted to happen. There'll probably be another generation or two of improvement, but noise levels are increasing. So to start planning that it's happening is reasonable. Sometime between now and, say, 2025. 2027 at the latest. But the last generation will experience lower beneficial gains.
I really think it's time to start planning for a changed architecture, with a strong increase in parallel algorithms, and a shift towards languages that make that easy. FWIW, I'm not alone in this opinion. Most recently designed languages tend to presume that this is going to be important. There may, however, be only a few who think it should go down as far as the chip assembly language, as I do. What I'm in favor of it using something like Erlang's BEAM virtual machine and implementing it as the assembler. And designing with LOTS of CPUs (that's a misnomer in this context) with perhaps one or two of the current chip design for sequential operations....and even that's wrong. It should be a specialized design that has a processor more similar to a 64 bit i386 than to a current processor, but with additional operations to facilitate "actor" i/o from the other processors. Each of the processors should have a small dedicated FAST cache and a much larger non-volatile cache (so it won't dissipate power in just holding memory). I have a suspicion that some of the announcements about "neural style computers" being developed are actually this kind of a system. If it's done right this should reduce the cooling needs significantly, to the point where actual 3-D chips become feasible. Hopefully without the need for internal cooling systems, as those add tremendously to the complexity. Then these chips could themselves be connected via a message passing network for increased power. And there should also be GPU modules for graphics processing, redesigned to communicate with the main system via message passing.
What I'm proposing is clearly not an optimum design, but merely a first cut by someone who isn't expert in the field...but it seems about right to me. And it leaves place to allow the attachment of any desired peripherals, as long as they communicate with the system by message passing, with is already fairly standard for most peripherals. (DMA channels, e.g., are few and far between.)
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