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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 JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:21PM (1 child)
FAH on a notebook is kind of a misplaced idea in the first place, and the notebook lives in the bedroom so fan noise is not an option - but, it's the most powerful system I've got and I thought I'd at least throw one more work unit to FAH after their recent little victory press release, so I tried it again.
I've got other systems in other rooms (with slower CPUs), but they too crank up their fans in response to heavy CPU loading and I really hate having to disassemble things just to clean the fans - $30/year for the electricity I can handle as a charity donation, but catching an overheating problem and doing a 2 hour repair job when it crops up isn't on my list of things I like to do in life.
What I wonder is why FAH hasn't found a charity sponsor who bids up Amazon EC2 spot instances for them? At $0.0035/hr ($30.60/year), that's pretty close to the price than I can buy electricity for my CPUs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:52PM
I 100% agree on all points. Being a hardware hacker I have a couple/few compressors, so occasionally I drag a computer outside and blow out the dust. I've always been frustrated with computer "cooling" systems. Let's suck dirty dusty air in everywhere we can, especially into floppy / optical drives. Let's also have very fine-finned heatsinks so we can collect that dust. Real equipment has fans that suck air in through washable / replaceable filters. A long time ago I had modded a couple of my computers- just flipped the fans around and attached filters.
People with forced-air HVAC will have much more dust in their computers. I highly advocate better filtration in HVAC, plus room air filters.
I have never, and would never run FAH or SETI or any such thing on a laptop. I don't leave laptops running unattended for very long.
My computers, and ones I admin, are all somewhat older by today's standards (4+ years) but have decent enough computing and GPU power. FAH won't use my GPUs- dumb!
Ideally we'll all get power from the sun. Major companies like Amazon are investing in rooftop solar generation. They could / should donate the watts to important projects like FAH.