Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)

#41

Post by semi-extrinsic » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 4:01 PM UTC

steego wrote: post #36

For all the interesting things happening today, this is an incredibly dull article. I'm convinced I read this same article in the 90's. If we're going to see any developments in alternative architectures and hardware, it's going to happen in the cloud computing space. From my perspective, this is the only sector that is in the unique position to sell specialized computing services to customers on a mass scale and mak…

Maybe the cloud computer guys will go there, but the high performance computing people are already well settled. Anton [1], a machine running custom ASICs for molecular dynamics, has already produced some very interesting biomolecular simulations. MDGRAPE3 was even earlier (completed in 2006).

There was also a (sadly failed) initiative about ten years back in Germany to build a custom ASIC for multigrid Poisson equation solvers. I'm sure there are more examples outside of my interests.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer)

Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)

#42

Post by tkinom » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 5:00 PM UTC

Moore's Law seems to reach its limit only for CPU clock. But it still moving very fast for GPU, FPGA, DDR, SSD, etc, right?

Or even in term of Network connection speed - 100mbps, 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G (at lease in data center where it matters a lot.)

The simple usb connection speed also continue to increase at a fast rate.

Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)

#43

Post by protomok » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 5:15 PM UTC

The chemical, wetware, fluid and ternary computing concepts mentioned in the article I guess make for a good headline but seem highly unlikely.

In the short term I really think we are entering the era of accelerators. Accelerators like Micron's Automata Processor (1) for graph analysis, accelerators for compute intensive applications like Convolutional Neural Nets, continued innovation in DSPs, GPUs, etc.

Accelerators that can either outperform traditional processors or use significantly less power I think represent one of the major next steps after Moore's law. What comes next may well be a slime mold computer but I think at this point is pure speculation.

(1) - http://www.micronautomata.com - actually I heard about this on HN!

Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)

#44

Post by ori_b » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

pantalaimon wrote: post #27

swalsh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86." I wonder if today it's easier than people imagine, but the lessons of Itanium are used as a signal to not try. Sure there are plenty of apps which make low-level use of x86 features, and those probably aren't going to be updated. However a lot of modern software is written in languages that go through interrupters. Java, C#, Python…

What about ARM?

It still uses binary logic.

Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)

#45

Post by zerohp » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 6:06 PM UTC

VT_Drew wrote: post #38

erdevs wrote: post #8

From the article: > "...Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a semiconductor chip of a given size doubles roughly every two years, has held true since the mid 1960s..." I thought it was the case that Moore's "Law" hasn't held up since ~2012. I believe Intel and others have stated that as of 2012 or so, with 22nm processes, transistor density now doubles every ~2.5 years a…

>I thought it was the case that Moore's "Law" hasn't held up since ~2012. I thought it was before that, like 1999. I pretty sure I had an Intel Pentium III 2 GHz processor in 99. The computer I am using to type this comment is 2.5 GHz. More's law is long dead, we aren't going to see 12 GHz machines in the next 6 years.

Aside from the obvious problems in your comparison. Moore's Law says nothing about frequency. The "rule" that changed around 2006 was Dennard scaling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Breakdown_of_D...

Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)

#46

Post by greggyb » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

tzakrajs wrote: post #31

ansible wrote: post #5

Well, none of those listed technologies is practical. Ternary logic is really cool, but it only gets you about a 10% efficiency improvement. I think it would be awesome to go in this direction, but retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86. The only thing that will really make progress is molecular nanotechnology. I had always believed that reaching the end of silicon process…

If anything this necessitates advances in parallel computing. We can keep up with Moores law for a bit longer if we add more cores too.

Moore's law is about transistor density.

Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)

#47

Post by steego » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

steego wrote: post #36

For all the interesting things happening today, this is an incredibly dull article. I'm convinced I read this same article in the 90's. If we're going to see any developments in alternative architectures and hardware, it's going to happen in the cloud computing space. From my perspective, this is the only sector that is in the unique position to sell specialized computing services to customers on a mass scale and mak…

I feel bad for calling this a dull article. This is actually a decent and eye opening article that introduces people to unconventional computing. For middle-aged people who have a cursory interest in the direction of alternative computing, it reads like a hyped Popular Science article from the 90's.

Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)

#48

Post by erdevs » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 6:33 PM UTC

steego wrote: post #36

For all the interesting things happening today, this is an incredibly dull article. I'm convinced I read this same article in the 90's. If we're going to see any developments in alternative architectures and hardware, it's going to happen in the cloud computing space. From my perspective, this is the only sector that is in the unique position to sell specialized computing services to customers on a mass scale and mak…

I think you are right on, on every point. (Including it being a dull article, at least for the audience of folks here.) This is great insight and it's something I've thought for the past few years as well.

Big cloud computing players will almost certainly move this way. Actually surprised we haven't seen more of this already. But TensorFlow and the Tensor Processing Unit were smart moves by Google and I think this is just a preview of many, many things to come.

I think IBM probably belongs on the list of top contenders to make a move. Between SoftLayer, IBM's hardware and chip design and fab partnerships, their cloud/saas businesses, and their Enterprise penetration, they're well-positioned to lead here.

I think that you're right as well that all these folks will push to create developer-friendly services and APIs backed by hardware. However, I think the real wins will come from capturing market share in the Enterprise sooner than later. If I were them and I had to prioritize between the two, I'd target Enterprise customers first and foremost. You can sell services to help them migrate and that helps you get out to market more quickly than creating a fully robust self-serve platform. Moreover, if your custom hw-backed platform can offer either better price or better performance, Enterprises will pay big bucks for it. Harder to get it right with self-serve first, but you certainly need to open up to self-serve as quickly as possible over time.

Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)

#49

Post by erdevs » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

protomok wrote: post #43

The chemical, wetware, fluid and ternary computing concepts mentioned in the article I guess make for a good headline but seem highly unlikely. In the short term I really think we are entering the era of accelerators. Accelerators like Micron's Automata Processor (1) for graph analysis, accelerators for compute intensive applications like Convolutional Neural Nets, continued innovation in DSPs, GPUs, etc. Accelerator…

Yes, almost certainly the next phase for performance-intensive computing is more specialized chips, systems-on-a-chip, and whole specialized rigs. The TensorFlow Processing Unit is a good recent example of this, as are ASICs in bitcoin mining, specialized hardware in molecular biology simulation, and more examples. This is just the beginning.

I think the interesting question is what happens after that. Not too long from now, specialized systems will run up against the same physical limits that general purpose processors have begun to hit the past few years as well, as specialized fabs increase in capability and sophistication. We see this already with GPUs.

Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)

#50

Post by nickpsecurity » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 6:38 PM UTC

ansible wrote: post #5

Well, none of those listed technologies is practical. Ternary logic is really cool, but it only gets you about a 10% efficiency improvement. I think it would be awesome to go in this direction, but retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86. The only thing that will really make progress is molecular nanotechnology. I had always believed that reaching the end of silicon process…

I tried to fix that by submitting this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12227555

What do you think about that advancement? Think the quantom dot circuits can get practical enough to go anywhere? Or even good potentially for low-volume, high-price applications we see with some S-ASIC's or ASIC's?