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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 ilsa on Monday January 29 2018, @09:09PM (2 children)
And of course don't forget WinPrinters too. Printers that would only work on windows because the print engine was done in the driver software. The hardware was completely dumb and unusable on it's own.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday January 30 2018, @12:34AM (1 child)
Ugh. WinPrinters. I had completely blissfully forgotten about them. Why'd you remind me. I've never touched one. I remember when they came out I just felt like the world was going a bad direction. I was already running Linux and who knows what else. I don't remember if you could set up Windows as a print server in those days; regardless, it just seemed like a terrible thing to be bound to an MS product, and who knows if it would work in the next Windows update or version. I'm glad they faded away.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday January 30 2018, @10:00PM
IIRC, Windows was capable of acting as a print server for as long as networking was a thing. As early as Windows 3.1 I believe. But that still meant you needed to have a windows machine sitting on your network, as networked printers were still very very rare and expensive.
But agreed. I'm glad all those Win-things were just a passing fad.