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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

#41

Post by jessriedel »

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…

> 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)

The number of problems for which quantum computing offers a speedup is very limited. It is absolutely not a general, all-purpose computational architecture.

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

#42

Post by tim333 »

chrisatumd wrote: post #25
pedalpete wrote: post #22

I was recently thinking about Moore's Law and if it is truly coming to an end. My initial reaction is that it doesn't matter in itself, if the number of transistors doubles, what might matter is that our compute power is doubling. This led me to think that maybe Moore's Law is looking at the wrong metric, and is there a more fundamental law regarding increased capacity. Some proof of this is in the drop in prices of…

The idea that exponential growth has been happening long before Moore's law is one of the main themes of Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is Near". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near

Here's one of his graphs from 1900 to 1995 starting with census counting technology in 1900. If you allow GPUs as info tech then we are about in line with his most optimistic projection.

graph http://globedia.com/imagenes/noticias/2011/10/17/singularida...

7 TFlops for $1000 http://www.pcworld.com/article/2898093/nvidia-fully-reveals-...

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

#43

Post by tim333 »

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

While PGs idea is likely too hard to be doable there is an interesting practical approach with things like Elixir which make multicore fairly easy using functional programming:

"""

Other languages skirt these issues by running on a single CPU with multiple processes to achieve concurrency; however, as Moore's Law pushes us towards increasing multicore CPUs, this approach becomes unmanageable. Elixir's immutable state, Actors, and processes produce a concurrency model that is easy to reason about and allows code to be written distributively without extra fanfare.

"""

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

#44

Post by jacobr1 »

ghaff wrote: post #2

It'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…

Even if we don't produce smaller circuits, we still might produce cheaper ones. There is still plenty of room to go to reduce fab costs. Especially since we basically replace them every few years. Consider if intel solely spent time iterating on cost. We also have made headway on power-reduction. I could see further improvements there. In aggregate I could imagine even if we don't see greater chip density we could see, say, AWS compute power/cost continuing Moore's trend for some time.

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

#45

Post by baobabaobab »

chipsy wrote: post #27
selimthegrim wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

The logistic function (or "S-curve") describes systems that expand first at exponential rates, then logarithmic ones. With respect to new technologies, it's been observed that adoption rates and most measurable improvements follow a logistic function. For example, people did not go from buying 1 car to buying 10 cars and then 100 cars - most of us hit saturation somewhere between 1 and 2, and stayed there. Similarly,…

>What we don't know is whether there is a logistic curve on technology as a whole. Belief in the Singularity is premised on this not being the case.

That's a version of the Singularity to extreme even for Kurzweil. It's premised on technological growth not hitting the log portion of the curve before machine intelligence passes humans.

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

#46

Post by mtdewcmu »

pedalpete wrote: post #22

I was recently thinking about Moore's Law and if it is truly coming to an end. My initial reaction is that it doesn't matter in itself, if the number of transistors doubles, what might matter is that our compute power is doubling. This led me to think that maybe Moore's Law is looking at the wrong metric, and is there a more fundamental law regarding increased capacity. Some proof of this is in the drop in prices of…

I think technological progress is more like a logistic curve, with exponential-like growth at the beginning and then a leveling off. Look at technologies that have already had time to mature. The speed of airplanes grew tremendously while jet engines and wing shapes were undergoing heavy refinement, but then it leveled off and hasn't really budged in decades.

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

#47

Post by orionblastar »

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…

They are working on optic chips that use photons. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150813142710.h...

Having X86 and ARM chips means you can run legacy code on them from a long time ago. Which is why they are so popular. But once we go to optical chips for quantum computing there will be no legacy apps from X86 or ARM on them. It would have to write apps from scratch.

Windows 10 is the last version of Windows for a reason. Microsoft is porting their enterprise stuff like SQL Server to Linux. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-s...

You can tell that Microsoft knows that Windows is getting long in the tooth, and has to support legacy code, and still has old code in it for compatibility reasons. They look at other operating systems like Linux to port their enterprise apps to in order to sell tech support and take a stab at Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. They know that Linux gets ported to different platforms and so can SQL Server to give them a larger marketshare.

The old X86 and ARM designs are limited due to legacy support of older programs. But they are marketed as backward compatible with older chips.

IBM's Power has been open sourced as OpenPower. http://openpowerfoundation.org/

The Dragonball CPU tries to build on the M68K family of processors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_DragonBall

So you got a lot of backward compatible CPUs out there, that are limited because they have to support legacy code. The new processors that don't have backward compatibility should run faster with fewer quirks and use new technology not from the 1980s, but programs have to be written from scratch or ported from other platforms.

Windows 10 is the last version of Windows because Microsoft knows that it will eventually have to drop compatibility in order to compete with the new systems and new processors out there that don't have legacy support. The X86-64 chips are a dead-end, and Microsoft has to look to other technologies and a different operating system. Linux is a good choice to support even if Microsoft does not officially have a Linux distro yet. If they open source their enterprise tools like Dotnet or CLR or Roslyn or Visual Studio Code SQL Server to Linux and OSX and other platforms they can sell tech support for it via their paid hotlines. Even making iOS and Android apps for Office and other things.

Microsoft is going to move away from X86-64 and Windows eventually, and focus on The Cloud instead and Azure in hosting VPS operating systems. Then when the new design of processors come out that put X86 and ARM to shame they can port their programs to that new platform.

If you remember the original Micro-Soft business model was to make programs for computers that other companies made and make them for different operating systems. They only got into DOS because IBM made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Windows was basically their attempt at making a Mac GUI for DOS, and working with IBM to bring OS/2 was yet another GUI attempt, but they quit OS/2 and focused on Windows instead. OS/2 was going to be ported to PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, SH4 and other RISC processors because IBM and Microsoft saw the limitations of the 80X86 processors and wanted something new. But it fell apart. Then Windows NT 4.0 was ported to MIPS, Alpha, etc but abandoned. Windows RT was ported to ARM but flopped. Every attempt to move away from 80X86 processors met with disaster because people wanted to run legacy code.

But soon it will be a new day with new processors and new computers not based on 1980s designs and using Linux or some other FOSS OS and connecting with Cloud computers.

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

#48

Post by daveguy »

chipsy wrote: post #27
selimthegrim wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

The logistic function (or "S-curve") describes systems that expand first at exponential rates, then logarithmic ones. With respect to new technologies, it's been observed that adoption rates and most measurable improvements follow a logistic function. For example, people did not go from buying 1 car to buying 10 cars and then 100 cars - most of us hit saturation somewhere between 1 and 2, and stayed there. Similarly,…

I am of the strong opinion that most technological advancement that is mistaken for endless exponential improvement (eg Moore's law) actually follows a physical sigmoidal curve. I also agree that "the singularity" is a belief based proposition and I personally think it amounts to techno-woo.

However, one interesting argument for continuation of technological advancement beyond what we might call "singularity" levels today. If technology maintains an exponential tragectory for another century or so through a few more breakthroughs then we would have some amazing tech.

So, it is not required that tech advancement is exponential -- as long as we are still early enough in the sigmoidal curve that more exponential (and linear) advancement is still to come. With biotech, quantum and the algorithmic side of AI I think we still have quite a bit of advancing to do. That said, the singularity stuff is still ridiculous woo woo.

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

#49

Post by pixl97 »

Animats wrote: post #28

The use of highly parallel GPUs as general purpose compute elements is a major trend. Most graphics boards have more compute power than the main CPU they serve. The Titan and Summit supercomputers have most of their compute power in the GPUs. The limits of GPU parallelism haven't been reached yet. Machine learning can be done on GPUs, and that's the biggest CPU hog problem right now that is getting mainstream use. Th…

>With the 20TB SSD drive expected in 4 years,

4? Samsung is shipping (a very few select partners) 16TB SSDs now! I suspect in 4 years we'll be closer to 50TB.

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

#50

Post by hyperpallium »

chipsy wrote: post #27
selimthegrim wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

The logistic function (or "S-curve") describes systems that expand first at exponential rates, then logarithmic ones. With respect to new technologies, it's been observed that adoption rates and most measurable improvements follow a logistic function. For example, people did not go from buying 1 car to buying 10 cars and then 100 cars - most of us hit saturation somewhere between 1 and 2, and stayed there. Similarly,…

Some of those are demand limited. People can't use 10 or 100 cars; street-legal limits aren't technology limits.

When a technology limit is reached, but not a demand limit, interest and capital flow to other technologies for meeting that need, starting a new s-curve. eg peak oil prices lead to fracking.

Whether it will be at Moore rates we don't know. But the possibility of far superior information technology has a proof by example: biological neurons.

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