The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
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Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#2This fragmentation was predicted well over a decade ago, but we're finally seeing mass market realization of these predictions.
The most relevant idea here is Koomey's Law [1], which postulates that the "number of computations per joule of energy dissipated doubled about every 1.57 years." This law is essentially a combination of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling. As transistors get smaller, Moore's Law predicts increases in the number of transistors on a chip, while Dennard scaling predicts decreasing power usage per transistor. For many years, Moore's Law really just tracked with Dennard scaling; CPU on-die areas weren't getting substantially larger (to my knowledge), but transistors were getting smaller and more efficient, so more could fit in a given area.
However, Dennard scaling also says that the power density of a transistor remains constant. As transistors became smaller, more of the die became occupied by transistors, causing more heat dissipation per unit area. After exhausting cooling options (think back to the TDP of those CPUs back in the late-90s/early 2000s), Dennard scaling died in the mid-to-late 2000s because of thermal issues.
However, just because heat can't be dissipated doesn't mean CPU manufacturers won't try to cram more and more transistors in a given area. As a result, a modern CPU will not use all its transistors at once because it would overheat, creating "dark silicon". Once in that paradigm, the next logical design approach was prioritizing application-specific transistor clusters, the extent of which we're now seeing.
While I generally agree with the authors, the key in these circumstances is to find ways to combine the fragments and make a better whole. Perhaps we'll have a "brain board" attached to the motherboard, where sockets on the brain board allow user-specific processor cores to be installed. Not everyone needs an i9 or even an i7, and maybe not everyone needs advanced ML performance.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#3I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software.
Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming).
There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers.
But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque reality where the only programs they have access to don't do what they want, and so their work becomes "working around the bad program."
I helped a lady on Friday at a midsized bank whose job it was to take a set of dates in an Excel file, search each one individually into an internal search tool, then Ctrl+f the result report and verify that every code listed in the original document exists in the report.
For 100+ entries.
Every month.
In 2023.
What the fuck are we doing as a society, that this lady, with a machine that could compute the above in a fraction of a second, has to spend a decent chunk of her work time doing this?
Example specifically chosen because I've seen innumerable similar "internal development will never work on this, because it's too small of an impact" issues at every company.
Computers should work for us. All of us. Not the other way around.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#4I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…
Kind of a counterpoint: I've heard countless stories (albeit, in Japan) of people doing things like "manually" doing additions of numbers they already have in a spreadsheet instead of just asking Excel to do the addition in what, two clicks, because they "can't trust the computer to do it right" which sounds like a BS rationalization to justify that they wouldn't have much of a job if the computer was doing it.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#5I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…
A large amount of inefficiency is actually a chain of accountability. Trust, and failing that assigning blame, and trusting those assignments, is the root of so. much.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#6The failure is primarily due to stagnation in single core speed improvements since 2003, compared to previous decades.
Yes we have more cores now, and single cores have got faster, but nothing like the scale of the 1990's when raw clock speeds increased 150x.
Moore's law is about the number of transistors, not the speed of the device. More cores are good, but software is hard to parallelize, despite decent efforts from the CS community.
There have also been efforts to put FPGAs into general purpose CPUs. These have also not taken off.
For most users, a single core CPU running at 30GHz would appear faster than 32 cores running at 2GHz.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#7I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…
Kind of a counterpoint: I've heard countless stories (albeit, in Japan) of people doing things like "manually" doing additions of numbers they already have in a spreadsheet instead of just asking Excel to do the addition in what, two clicks, because they "can't trust the computer to do it right" which sounds like a BS rationalization to justify that they wouldn't have much of a job if the computer was doing it.
Perhaps some folks here are too young to remember the Pentium FDIV bug[1], but it's not complete BS to distrust the calculations.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#8Machine learning is a massive counter example to this trend. Specialised deep learning hardware is just supporting an even more general GPT.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#9I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…
While this is true and arguably of more importance, the thesis of the article was something quite specific: "the economic cycle that has led to the usage of a common computing platform, underpinned by rapidly improving universal processors, is giving way to a fragmentary cycle, where economics push users toward divergent computing platforms driven by special purpose processors". This is likely to exacerbate the issue you describe, but it is not caused by it.
I don't think your observation was any less true 20 years ago either. There hasn't been a "decline", as such - more of a failure to realize potential. Office Space (1999) was full of people doing mindless busywork that could easily be automated.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#10I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…
This sounds like a perfect use-case for automation using recorded macros. The failure (or perhaps solutions exist) is lack of facilities in our desktop OSes.