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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: 2) by HiThere on Sunday January 28 2018, @06:40PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 28 2018, @06:40PM (#629532) Journal

    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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