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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

#51

Post by gozur88 »

mtdewcmu wrote: post #46
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.

Technologies can take leaps and bounds, too, though. If you view the modern computer as an evolution of the abacus the flat part of the curve was the first few thousand years. It's possible quantum computing, say, or neural nets will be leaps of that order.

Or maybe not. It's impossible to predict true breakthroughs.

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

#52

Post by bcrack »

danjoc wrote: post #31

While "cloud" may be a big part of the future of computing, I think the relationship painted between that and the end of Moore's law is tenuous at best. I believe a more plausible link exists between the end of Moore's law and the rise of open hardware as explained in this article: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1321796 TL;DR If eight year old hardware is almost as fast as today's hardware, there is ample…

The article argues a very interesting point and there might definitely be an opportunity for more competitive open hardware. At the same time, it feels kind of sad that it would take a technical constraint for this to happen; that is, rather than a change in culture.

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

#53

Post by b1661727 »

jacobr1 wrote: post #44
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 se…

Those old fabs are often used for embedded chips.

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

#54

Post by fauria »

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…

That's one of the problems that 3D stacking present: http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2015/02/3d-chips.cfm

I would also bet on a combination of specialized hardware for certain software, something along the lines of Bitcoin miners ASICs.

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

#55

Post by kumarski »

selimthegrim wrote: post #21
kumarski wrote: post #14

Limitless exponential growth doesn't happen in the physical world, it happens on S-curves. Black phosphorus anyone?

Care to elaborate?

People in silicon valley who believe in AI/ML/Battery Technology/Solar/Wind Turbines/Space Travel/Fusion Energy throw around "exponentially accelerating progress" as a platitude so obviously true that it doesn't warrant questioning. (PC quote with my edit)

"And despite Silicon Valley's ostensible belief in rationality and empirical evidence, we continue to assert this despite the data strongly suggesting that it just ain't so." - Patrick Collison

The race to 7nm is expensive.

I think the next big leap will be in Chip Design software which lives under a rock inside a ditch in an anachronism that is EDA - electronic design automation. There's got to be a better way that allows a chip designer to produce a high fidelity mixed signal analog chip at speed and scale without having to pay $25K+ for the software licenses and tooling.

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

#56

Post by b1449835 »

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…

The point of machines is that they do a single task better than us. A dishwasher is superhuman at washing plates but nothing else. If we model machines to be more like us they will end up with the same disadvantages of a normal human. At that point why not employ real humans in the first place?

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

#58

Post by noir_lord »

b1449835 wrote: post #56
ars wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The point of machines is that they do a single task better than us. A dishwasher is superhuman at washing plates but nothing else. If we model machines to be more like us they will end up with the same disadvantages of a normal human. At that point why not employ real humans in the first place?

> At that point why not employ real humans in the first place?

Cost mostly, If you can replicate a human-level intelligence for 10,000 (or 100,000) and have it work 24/7 with no time off and scale out to thousands of them then you'd have something absolutely terrifying in it's capability.

Image an AWS of a 1000 von-neumann level intelligences working co-operatively 24/7 on a problem.

The stuff of sci-fi right now but maybe one day, we know it's physically possible to build human level intelligences since we prove that the rest is 'just' engineering.

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

#59

Post by eikenberry »

pixl97 wrote: post #49
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.

I would say 20GB at scale with a decent storage/$ ratio in 4 years sounds right.

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

#60

Post by nickpsecurity »

jacobr1 wrote: post #44
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 se…

That's true. Seeing mask sets and EDA tooling get cheap at 90nm or 65nm could open up serious possibilities. The laptop still serving me well runs a CPU done on 65nm with other chips from even older nodes.
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