The future of computing: After Moore's law
economist.com
The future of computing: After Moore's law
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Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law
#2It's a pretty good piece. The main thing that it does skip over is what the economic implications might be to no longer declining transistor costs. Sure, Google can add a more or less arbitrarily large number of servers but what are the implications of the likely reality that those servers aren't improving in price/performance to the degree that they once were.
At Hot Chips a couple of years back Robert Colwell, who was director of the microsystems technology office at DARPA at the time, had a very interesting presentation on where things were going. One of the things that stuck with me at the time was his contention that there are lots of ways to improve performance etc. over time but CMOS was really pretty special.
"Colwell also points out that from 1980 to 2010, clocks improved 3500X and micro architectural and other improvements contributed about another 50X performance boost. The process shrink marvel expressed by Moore’s Law (Observation) has overshadowed just about everything else."
http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2016/01/beyond-general-purpose-...
Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law
#3While we're reaching the physical limits of classical chip design, do we have any ideas what the limits are on the algorithm side of things? As much speed up has come from software as hardware according to a few reports.
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/12/08/algorithms-vs-moore...
Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law
#4I like PG's idea [1] of trying to write a compiler that can utilize code to run on multiple cores, as if the cores were running in series, not parallel (think batteries).
Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law
#5I like PG's idea [1] of trying to write a compiler that can utilize code to run on multiple cores, as if the cores were running in series, not parallel (think batteries). [1]: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
That's the holy grail of The Cloud: just write a description of what you want and what you want happens. DWIM programmatic casting.
I think pg originated his "sufficiently smart compiler" startup idea in his pycon talk. You can find it online somewhere. The other take away from his talk was: just lie to customers about it being automated, manually farm out the parallelize-all-the-code tasks to works/interns/turks while saying it's "automatic," then eventually figure out how to automate it yourself later so you don't need pesky humans in the loop.
Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law
#6I like PG's idea [1] of trying to write a compiler that can utilize code to run on multiple cores, as if the cores were running in series, not parallel (think batteries). [1]: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
That's the holy grail of The Cloud: just write a description of what you want and what you want happens. DWIM programmatic casting. I think pg originated his "sufficiently smart compiler" startup idea in his pycon talk. You can find it online somewhere. The other take away from his talk was: just lie to customers about it being automated, manually farm out the parallelize-all-the-code tasks to works/interns/turks whi…
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Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law
#7While we're reaching the physical limits of classical chip design, do we have any ideas what the limits are on the algorithm side of things? As much speed up has come from software as hardware according to a few reports. http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/12/08/algorithms-vs-moore...
> do we have any ideas what the limits are on the algorithm side of things?
I've always believed that humans do not have the ability to program things smarter than themself, because we do not understand our own intelligence, so we have no way to reproduce it.
At the time, I said the only alternative I can think of is make random permutations and pick the best one, and go from there. But I said this as a ridiculous suggestion that no one would actually do.
But then Google actually did exactly that with their Go machine!
So, that's what I think: The future of computing will be based on randomness and the job of the programmer will be to guide it, but not program it directly. (Can you imagine programming a webpage this way? Or writing a book this way?)
Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law
#8I like PG's idea [1] of trying to write a compiler that can utilize code to run on multiple cores, as if the cores were running in series, not parallel (think batteries). [1]: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
That's the holy grail of The Cloud: just write a description of what you want and what you want happens. DWIM programmatic casting. I think pg originated his "sufficiently smart compiler" startup idea in his pycon talk. You can find it online somewhere. The other take away from his talk was: just lie to customers about it being automated, manually farm out the parallelize-all-the-code tasks to works/interns/turks whi…
I hope he was being facetitious... That exposes your customer base to an enormous amount of risk.
Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the holy grail of The Cloud: just write a description of what you want and what you want happens. DWIM programmatic casting. I think pg originated his "sufficiently smart compiler" startup idea in his pycon talk. You can find it online somewhere. The other take away from his talk was: just lie to customers about it being automated, manually farm out the parallelize-all-the-code tasks to works/interns/turks whi…
I hope he was being facetitious... That exposes your customer base to an enormous amount of risk.
Not really factitious. The whole "do things that don't scale (grit! be resilient! schlep!)" is pretty central to modern cult of pg startup dogma.
Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law
#10While we're reaching the physical limits of classical chip design, do we have any ideas what the limits are on the algorithm side of things? As much speed up has come from software as hardware according to a few reports. http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/12/08/algorithms-vs-moore...
> do we have any ideas what the limits are on the algorithm side of things? I've always believed that humans do not have the ability to program things smarter than themself, because we do not understand our own intelligence, so we have no way to reproduce it. At the time, I said the only alternative I can think of is make random permutations and pick the best one, and go from there. But I said this as a ridiculous su…
Humans every day "program" things smart than themselves. Every parent who raises a child smarter than themselves does exactly that. Smarter than human level computers will be created the same way we create smart humans.