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The future of computing: After Moore's law

economist.com

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Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law

#11

Post by api »

seiji wrote: post #5
dev1n wrote: post #4

I 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…

What's with "the cloud" here? That's the holy grail of any type of programming on any type of computing device at any scale. If that were possible it would be just as useful on a phone or a PC or a personal server.

Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law

#12

Post by shkkmo »

ars wrote: post #7
wolfram74 wrote: post #3

While 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…

While we may not have the ability to program things 'smarter' than themselves, we do have the ability to create tools that extend our intelligence. Machine learning, randomness, and even new javascript frameworks all fall under this umbrella.

Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law

#13

Post by stochastician »

ars wrote: post #7
wolfram74 wrote: post #3

While 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…

(Totally self-promoting here) I did a lot of work along this line in my PhD -- stochastic architectures for probabilstic computation. http://ericjonas.com/pages/circuits.html There's an increasing amount of interest in this space.

Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law

#15

Post by gizmo686 »

wolfram74 wrote: post #3

While 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...

It is worth remembering that just because we are reaching some physical limits of "classical" chip design. For example, both x86 and arm date back to the 80s. While I have no doubt that the implementation of these architectures has improved to reflect modern manufacturing capabilities, this still suggests that there is room for architectural improvements in performance.

Beyond simple architectural improvements, we could still move beyond basic transistor based computing. The most common example is quantum computing (which offers an asymptotic improvement in some cases), however I can imagine there beyond other classical devices that can compute certain functions more efficiently than a pure transistor based solution can.

Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law

#17

Post by kevinnk »

gizmo686 wrote: post #15
wolfram74 wrote: post #3

While 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...

It is worth remembering that just because we are reaching some physical limits of "classical" chip design. For example, both x86 and arm date back to the 80s. While I have no doubt that the implementation of these architectures has improved to reflect modern manufacturing capabilities, this still suggests that there is room for architectural improvements in performance. Beyond simple architectural improvements, we co…

> For example, both x86 and arm date back to the 80s.

Modern x86 and high performance ARM cores are almost unrecognizable compared to processors in the late 90s, much less the 80s. (Also, ARM was founded in 1990, not the 80s).

> While I have no doubt that the implementation of these architectures has improved to reflect modern manufacturing capabilities, this still suggests that there is room for architectural improvements in performance.

There are still performance improvements to be had, but it's not going to be anywhere near the performance scaling of Moore's law. The rate of architectural improvements is also slowing down as well (and increasingly only applicable for a smaller and smaller fraction of workloads).

> I can imagine there beyond other classical devices that can compute certain functions more efficiently than a pure transistor based solution can.

Like...? Quantum is 10+ years away right now and unlikely to get fast any time soon. CMOS has had decades and billions of dollars invested in scaling; it's going to be a long time before any of the current "CMOS killers" (virtually all of which are still transistors) reach parity.

Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law

#18

Post by sounds »

The article is click bait. Moore's law may slow down, but it will not be predicted in the Economist.

For example, a quote from the article:

"Moore’s law was never a physical law, but a self-fulfilling prophecy—a triumph of central planning"

The physics and triumphs of engineering were all about physical law; "The end of Moore's law" was always just around the corner because of physics.

No central planning led Intel to invest their billions in R&D.

Central planning can neither force nor halt additional refinements in transistor density or alternate ways to compute.

Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law

#19

Post by kevinnk »

graycat wrote: post #16

Research by K. Ebcioglu on very long instruction word (VLIW) shows that 24 way VLIW can get 9:1 speedup on ordinary code.

Compared to what? What does ordinary code mean?

VLIW has been around for a while (Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example) and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code").

Re: The future of computing: After Moore's law

#20

Post by Retric »

sounds wrote: post #18

The article is click bait. Moore's law may slow down, but it will not be predicted in the Economist. For example, a quote from the article: "Moore’s law was never a physical law, but a self-fulfilling prophecy—a triumph of central planning" The physics and triumphs of engineering were all about physical law; "The end of Moore's law" was always just around the corner because of physics. No central planning led Intel t…

Moore’s has been slowing down for a long time. In 1965 he wrote a paper predicting a doubling every year. In 1975 it was revised to double ~every 2 years. With 18 months as suggested by someone else being the accepted target for quite a while.

Intel failed to keep up with every 2 years back in 2012.

CEO of Intel, announced that "our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two.” This is scheduled to hold through the 10 nm width in late 2017.

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