Comments on: Is Moore’s Law Still Relevant for PCs?

By: Arthur Brownlee IV

Arthur Brownlee IV — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 03:22:33 +0000

Thanks for the write up, this was a fun read as I grew up always hear about how they weren’t going to meet “Moore’s Law” this year and that he was finally “wrong.”

For me, I see the great benefit right behind the curve. The CULV Intel laptops we have now are ideal, and without Moore’s law, we wouldn’t have these powerful enough, yet light on the battery laptops. Sure they aren’t the fastest kids on the block, but the last time I had to have the FASTEST was back in the P3 days. Since then, it has all been about the RAM and HDD. I actually still have a few P3 machines in the house doing their duties still quite well. Do I notice the difference between them and my i7? Of course. But do I notice the difference between my i7 and first gen C2D? No, not unless I’m in VMware.

I think it is just going to be a year or two more, and we’ll see a pressure again for faster machines. It’d be nice to think we’d start compressing web content such as video enough that I could stream 1080p on a 2mbps connection. Hey, we have the CPU cycles to do it, why not right?

By: Guillaume Arluison

Guillaume Arluison — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:11:13 +0000

Well I appreciate this point of view since I was wondering that myself for a couple of years now. I think the market is expanding, especially because of nomad uses… and social software/gaming. A lot of people now just use to take their “computer” on the go and chat/email/FB/twit/farmville with it which means they dont really need high end computers.

But for the office-like people, you forget one thing : if the CPUs are doubling their performance every now and then –> in parallel the software needs double the performance as well, yes even to do “simple” text processing (I mean writing letters). Try to use Office2007 on Window 7 or Vista with Aero (to do EXACTLY the same thing that writing your resume or a letter 10 years ago) and I really doubt you’ll do that on a 10 year old computer…

By: screwtop

screwtop — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 01:16:24 +0000

One interesting aspect of Moore’s law is that it can be applied to other components: RAM, disk, network capacity, and so on. While these are improving exponentially as well, they fall far behind the performance of modern CPUs, and the gap is always increasing. We may have faster CPUs than we need, but we also get increasingly unbalanced systems overall.

There’s also the effects of Wirth’s law, which states that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. I have a hunch that, these days, it’s the sheer size of software that is the big performance killer: loading all that code from disk when you first run an application takes an eternity in CPU-time, and it’s made worse in many cases by the organisation of some apps into large collections of small files (libraries, plug-ins, XML configuration files, etc.), each of which may incur a disk seek (at a cost of milliseconds each). Also, a large code base means that, unless you have plenty of system memory, you’ll be regularly hitting the disk for virtual memory and again taking a huge performance hit.

We’ve seen amazing advances over the decades, but I think Moore’s law has meant we can get away with a certain laziness in how we use the hardware, and we can definitely do better.

By: Ditiris

Ditiris — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:27:48 +0000

Yes, Moore’s Law is still relevant, and it will continue to be so as long as process shrinks occur (and vice versa, at least until the cost of building the foundries eclipses the lifetime revenues of the chips produced). The prime reason for this is that as process shrinks occur, power requirements are reduced, and performance is raised. What you’re missing here is that as power requirements are reduced, the very definition of what constitutes a personal computer changes. For example, most of the new smartphones have more in common with personal computers than they do with phones. It just so happens your computer can now make phone calls.

Power is now more important than performance (since the performance is so good). Most users don’t need any more computing power than a desktop from 10-15 years ago. What users want, as evidenced by the dramatic adoption of smartphones, tablet PCs, Kindles, etc. is reasonably powerful computers with excellent battery life. And what gets you there, is Moore’s Law (since we’re calling process shrinks Moore’s law).

By: sashoumaru

sashoumaru — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:08:01 +0000

One aspect of this Law is that the software counterpart is ignored. How well and efficient the software is implemented determines your need of hardware.
This is becoming even more apparent with the whole cloud services and web applications. What you need sometimes is enough power to run a web browser.
Alas, there is the mobile department where Moore’s law is at full throttle looking for more power to run standalone mobile apps while maximizing battery life.