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Moore's Law: Still Ruining Everything
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It must be a slow news day for popular tech writer Robert X. Cringely—he's
reporting a story
that hasn't changed in forty years. Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, famously predicted
in 1965 that computer speed would double about every twenty four months. This statement, later
dubbed "Moore's Law", continues to hold. Top-of-the-line desktop
computers today are several million times faster than the machines of yesteryear, and this
trend shows no signs of slowing. This is not news, but the ramifications may surprise you.
Quicker computers are ruining everything.
Gordon Moore, whose prediction of ever-faster computers has been,
unfortuantely, dead-on.
More Is Not Always Better
Pick anything from your daily life and just try and imagine a sudden doubling of capabilities. Much
seems overwhelming. Would you really want the Sunday paper to be twice as thick? Would you ever
give the kids the car keys if the engine purred happily up to 240 MPH? There is already plenty of
nothing on television, the desk lamp doesn't need to be twice as bright, and a 128oz soda is just
not necessary. More is not always better.
We can also envision an entire class of experiences where tons more is merely a marginal improvement.
It would be great if the ink in your pens lasted twice as long or you could erase mistakes in pencil twice
as quickly, but neither advancement would inspire a worldwide upgrade on office supplies. Increases
along the single dimension of performance are often uninteresting. What we so often need are
things that work, not things that work a little better.
The Engineers' Dilemma
Normally, when designing things like dams, automobiles, or waste treatment systems, engineers draw
upon a long history of similar projects and well-understood principles about the resources involved.
If you're building a bridge, for example, you will probably use concrete and steel and lots of big trucks.
In twenty five or fifty years, the bridge will hopefully still be there, serving its purpose, internal
members, components and systems behaving as predicted.
Software developers, however, can't help but think into the future. Today's computer hardware may be
limited, but thanks to Moore's Law, the computers of tomorrow will have plenty of power. Do you design
for what is available today or what will be common on the day you ship your product out the door? When
the new program finally reaches stores, you may be outshined by competitors whose software application
takes full advantage of the very latest hardware platform. By sticking to the technology of the
present, you could lose sales in the near future.
Better Comes From Being Stuck
The cost of oil
doesn't change much. From 1946 to 2007, the price of barrel has only increased by a
factor of four, whereas computers in the same time have increased in speed by a factor of forty million.
If oil was dropping in price as fast as computers were leapfrogging in speed, there would be no engineers
worrying about fuel efficiency. You could buy gas for life for less than dollar and drive a car the size
of a school bus. It sounds great, unless you are standing on the sidewalk, choking on fumes. The
cost of gas is the primary motivator for automotive engine innovation. If gas prices fell by 50% every
other year, we'd all be driving guzzlers.
After half a century, oil is only slightly more expensive than it used to be. Computers are 1.6 billion times faster.
Thanks to the continued genius of computer manufacturers and the eerie accuracy of Moore's Law, software
developers aren't stuck when it comes to computing power. For forty years, we have seen that there will
always be more processing capacity, more memory and more storage space in the next model. There are
virtually no limitations in the technology. There is no requirement that we stand back, assess what is
truly possible and advisable, and engineer accordingly. The hardware will always catch up.
Linkages upon Linkages
Software today is like an old wind-up clock, whose many gears and pendulums and escapements have been
hastily soldered into a disorderly network tying together other contraptions. It is a Rube Goldberg
machine of unprecedented proportion. But unlike the real world, where friction and materials science
makes building and adding on to such gadgetry impossible, Moore's law magically keeps the clock running,
assuring we can always tack on another layer of software affixed with duct tape and chewing gum to produce
some novel result. The claptrap system will stumble and crash, but always recover to grow again. Software
is this fantastical mess, linkages upon linkages, maniacal world without end.
One day, Moore's Law will finally be repealed. Although software can expand beyond reason and imagination,
hardware is indelibly limited by the laws of physics. The end of the line for the cancerous life of software
will cause computers to settle down. Like all other modern conveniences, making use of thinking machines
will finally become easy.
Unfortunately, Moore's Law stands unchallenged. All we can do in the meantime is grit our teeth and
continue to upgrade.
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