
Computing power: A deeper law than Moore's? - ColinWright
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/10/computing-power
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breakyerself
This Koomey guy better have a conversation with Ray Kurzwiel before he go's
around naming this "Discovery" after himself. Considering Kuyrzwiel's book
"The Singularity is Near" already covered this phenomenon 7 years ago. I
didn't see anything in this article that I hadn't heard before. That chart is
nearly identical to ones in Kurzwiel's book.

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TimGebhardt
Moore's law was simply an observation or a prediction about the computing
market at that time: That the number of transistors on a chip would need to
double every 18 months if the chip manufacturers hoped to get people to buy
the next gen. He argued that people/companies wouldn't upgrade their existing
equipment for a measly 10-50% increase in performance. They'd need to double
performance if they wanted to get rapid turn over to the next generation of
products.

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dmfdmf
tl;dr: Some researcher does the math and finds that computer chips are
becoming more efficient over time, i.e., electrical efficiency doubles every
1.6 years. He wants to call it Koomey's Law.

Neither Moore's or Koomey's "Law" are very deep and don't really rise to the
level of a true physical law. Its been known for a long time that Moore's
"Law" was going to eventually run into the real laws of physics and that seems
to be happening now.

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mistercow
>Its been known for a long time that Moore's "Law" was going to eventually run
into the real laws of physics and that seems to be happening now.

I have been hearing people say this for a very long time, but I've never seen
good evidence that it was true. I mean, at any point in time, the state of the
art has "run into the laws of physics" - that's why it's the state of the art.
At any given moment, the best we can do is limited by some physical property.
Processors don't get faster because Intel just decides to turn the clock speed
up. They get faster because researchers find ways around the old physical
limitations.

And I think that's the fundamental misunderstanding people have about Moore's
law and similar consistent growth trends. People see a consistent curve and
they think "Oh, this is just the natural course of progress, and so it shall
always be." But that's not how it works. The reality is that each point on
that curve is the result of team of very smart people making a breakthrough.

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dmfdmf
> The reality is that each point on that curve is the result of team of very
> smart people making a breakthrough.

My view is not meant to disparage the work of the people who keep the progress
going. My point is that at some point Moore's "Law" has to breakdown since
nothing real can double forever but perhaps you don't find
philosophical/metaphysical arguments compelling.

As way of analogy, look at electric power generation based on a heat engine
cycle. Ultimately you run into theoretical limits based on the Second Law of
thermodynamics. On top of these physical constraints are Economic Law such as
marginal utility which determine if it is really economically efficient to
spend x dollars to gain y increase in efficiency or to stop short of the
theoretical limit due to diminishing returns on investment in efficiency
gains. These are real laws that computer chips will eventually run into.

My understanding of computer chips is that they are running into thermal
limits and also bumping into quantum tunneling effects that are interfering
with the deterministic nature of logic gates. I am sure people are working on
ways around these limits and they may very well may find new and brilliant
ways to continue the increase in processing power. It may even be true that
theoretical limits to computation are far far away from where we are now and
Moore's "Law" will continue to apply for decades but it still would not make
it a actual physical law in the proper sense of the term.

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mistercow
Yes, there is a point where the doubling has to stop, but what I'm taking
issue with is that people tend to point to current physical limitations as
evidence that Moore's law is already over, or nearly dead. And at any given
time in the history of computers, you could look at the fastest processors and
say "they're bumping up against limit X". But until X is Bremmermann's
limit[1], that is not an indication that progress will slow.

Incidentally, if Moore's law were to continue and it were as simple as "speed
per mass doubles every 18 months", it would still take somewhere on the order
of 300 years for us to approach Bremmermann's limit.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit>

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wmf
This seems like a straightforward corollary of Dennard's power scaling law
which says that the power of a transistor should be proportional to its area.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSFET#MOSFET_scaling>

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sharp11
"Some researchers are already building devices that run on “ambient” energy
harvested from light, heat, vibration or TV transmitters."

Very cool.

