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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @01:18AM
For me it wa 1983. Preloaded services with 1 to n of a given service so that disk IO could be interwoven. On that machine 1 disk IO was equal 40,000 asset instructions. So a name search normally had 3 services to share by 72 workstation / users. And 20 llines to show on a display would work out to 0.75 secs. Always once the system learned how many simotatus requests it needed to support.