The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending • Hacker News Board

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#41

Post by nly » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 4:09 PM UTC

fiatmoney wrote: post #9

ghshephard wrote: post #5

Whenever I'm wondering if Moore's law is still prevailing as a trailing indicator, I check out: http://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/ If that (logarithmic) chart starts to flatten - particularly for device #500 (more price sensitive than the first part of the list) on the list, then we're running into real obstacles. Let's check back in 2020 and see if Device #500 is running at 10 Petaflops.

Most (all?) of those machines are clusters that scale mostly by throwing in nodes. Even if you have completely static technology, you'll see an exponential trend as long as you're scaling with economic growth by adding nodes.

Throwing in nodes doesn't help you get past the $/Gflop barrier, which is ultimately what is important.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#42

Post by nly » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 4:12 PM UTC

tedsanders wrote: post #17

beloch wrote: post #3

The end of Moore's law will probably come at about the same time true human-like AI appears. i.e. It seems like it will always be just a few decades in the future. e.g. Here's an economist article (sadly, paywalled) predicting that the end was nigh in 1995! http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-17272668.html If you extrapolate current designs out then, yes, a size barrier is approaching. So, we should expect new designs to…

Just because people were wrong in the past, doesn't mean that people are wrong now. This time, I really do think it's different. Historically, scaling provided a few benefits. As transistors got smaller, they went faster and used less power. They also got cheaper. The first benefit, going faster and more efficient dried up back in the early 2000s when leakage currents because a problem. This is why transistors have b…

> or if we radically change the fabrication process and turn transistors sideways

This reminded me so much of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_PyKuI7II

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#43

Post by ekianjo » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 4:18 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #40

ekianjo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The past couple centuries ?? Centuries? You mean twenty/thirty years, probably? We don't really have computers until about 50 years ago, and even then it was not widespread. You don't have to wonder what post-Moore's law will look like. Look at other industries when they become mature. The car industry is one example: there's not that much innovation that goes into making a car better in terms of performance. I mea…

Cars are miles ahead of where they were in 1983 (pardon the pun). Compare everything from a family sedan to a sports car of the current era to then. Tires, creature comforts, horsepower, emissions, fuel economy, safety...

The comparison is moot. You can't drive 100 times faster with a car from 2013 than from 1983. With computers, you saw that huge progression in a matter of 10 years. Now what you have in your pocket is close to what used to run servers 10 years ago in terms of power (or maybe exceeds it). If at all, your argument strengthens my point that cars have stopped evolving in performance and now car manufacturers work on other attributes.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#44

Post by walid » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 11:56 AM UTC

wycx wrote: post #35

ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, consider that you haven't spent any money on a computer in 4 years. Look at the 'health' of the computer companies like HP, Dell, Acer, etc. The problem here is a bit more insidious than you might assume at first glance. The reason you can buy a motherboard for $100 which has close to a thousand individual components soldered to a 16 layer board is because a manufacturer invested tens of millions of dollars in a…

However, look at the direction desktop hardware is going. Integration of more and more functionality into SoCs is the future for non-high performance desktop computing. The more components that are integrated into the chip, the less there needs to be on the motherboard. Even better, all the high speed stuff can move onto the chip, making motherboard design easier. How long until SoCs come with RAM on die? Could you g…

> So whilst you may lose economy of scale on the motherboard side, I think you will gain it back via integration, however, you will lose the ability to customise.

True but if the SoC was advanced enough it can make customization unnecessary. After all a phone or tablet or laptop or a desktop or a server is just a computer with some processing power and memory. Old super computers can now fit on a Samsung Galaxy Gear. Add more of the same to the SoC or make SoCs of varying specs. Who needs customization in such an environment.