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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 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