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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 MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday January 28 2018, @08:25PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Sunday January 28 2018, @08:25PM (#629561) Homepage Journal

    All the CS majors at Kuro5hin said that was impossible but I have a physics degree and they don't.

    Surely there is a reason we plug our servers into the wall or build expensive batteries into our mobile device.

    Here's a simple one:

    There is an x86_64 instruction that turns the cache off for just one cache line. For this to work the coder has to fill the entire cache line with new data.

    If you don't use that instruction then write some data into the cache line, a line from the level 2 cache will be read into the L1 cache line, then just that one bit of data will overwrite a little piece of it. If you go on to overwrite the entire line, that L2 cache read will be wasted.

    I've tinkered with ways to do this but being homeless made it infeasible to perform actual measurements.

    But it seems to me that it's enough simply to point out this can be done. For that energy savings to make a real difference a vast number of codebases will need to be refactored.

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