Forget Moore's Law

[DrDoogie]

Kom over en artig artikkel her paa /., som jeg tenkte jeg kunne droevtygge litt for generell konsum.

 

Forget Moore's law, but not because it's merely a commitment by the semiconductor industry to drive silicon gate technology forward 67 percent a year. Forget Moore's law, but not because it isn't true.

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Forget Moore's law because it is unhealthy. Because it has become our obsession. Because high tech has become fixated on it at the expense of everything else--especially business strategy. It is precisely this fixation, at the cost of other considerations like profit, product, and market, that led to the dot-com bubble and bust.

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An extraordinary announcement was made a couple of months ago, one that may mark a turning point in the high-tech story. It may be the single most important news item in the digital world since the implosions of Cisco Systems and Yahoo almost two years ago.

It was a statement by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. His words were both simple and devastating: when asked how the 64-bit Itanium, the new megaprocessor from Intel and Hewlett-Packard, would affect Google, Mr. Schmidt replied that it wouldn't. Google had no intention of buying the superchip. Rather, he said, the company intends to build its future servers with smaller, cheaper processors.

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Often forgotten is that Moore's law has three variables: price, density, and performance, each of which contributes to the 100 percent improvement the law promises every couple years. But in practice, technology leaders have always stuck with the density track, adding ever more computing power to their products for the same price.

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A well-known rule about doing business in technology is that nobody ever bet against Moore's law and won.

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Less obvious, and less interesting, are the tens of thousands of tech companies that trail the law and finally opt out of the chase altogether.

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But few have pointed out the fate of those companies that choose to live by Moore's law alone. These are the creatures of the booms and bubbles. We saw thousands of them four years ago--all of them are dead now.

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There is a once-famous, but now nearly forgotten, statement made in the early '60s by an executive at Texas Instruments. The executive said that when the electronics age was over and all the profits and losses were added up, the bottom line would be red.

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Few people, even in technology, realize that the original 4- and 8-bit microprocessor architectures of the early '70s are still being built by the billions each year for use in everything from cameras to toys. We may be focusing on Pentium 4s, but its great-great-great-great-great grandfather, the 8008, is, quantitatively speaking, a greater part of our daily lives.

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Industry watcher Donald Luskin noted earlier this year that even Intel is finding itself being slowly crushed by Moore's law. He pointed out that just to keep its revenue level, Intel must convince its customers to double their power every 18 months or to stick with its current offerings and find twice as many customers.

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As Mr. Schmidt points out in his notes, with Intel's research and development costs doubling every 18 months (apparently R&D follows Moore's law as well), in another 20 years the company's R&D costs will be $31 trillion annually. Something must give long, long before then.

But give the last word to Mr. Moore himself, who once said, "Obviously, you can't just keep doubling every couple years. After a while the numbers just become absurd. You'd have the semiconductor industry alone bigger than the entire GDP of the world."

 

Kilde:http://www.redherring.com/insider/2003/02/moore021003.html

 

Artig lesning - selv har jeg en 700MHz prosessor paa hoved-datamaten min, og planlegger heller aa kjoepe mange smaa prosessorer som jeg kan sette opp som "kverne-kluster" ettersom jeg trenger det, fremfor aa kjoepe en blodig dyr ny prosessor som blir utnyttet i 0.1% av tida.

[Term]

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[JohndoeMAKT]

For prisen av et granite bay MB og en P4, kan du kjøpe ca 5 Celeron 1200Mhz prosessorer og hovedkort. Billig kraft det.