"What about Moore's Law?"
What about it? Moore's Law just talks about the number of transistors doubling every 18 months or so. Now true, more transistors used to mean greater performance, but it doesn't have to mean that. And clock rates aren't going to increase at the rate they used to either. Besides, Moore's Law might not be in force much longer, there are all kinds of problems that manifest themselves at 90nm and below that might slow down the pace of shrinking the features.
And, unlike in the past, there just isn't a whole lot of low hanging fruit. The amount of instruction level parallelism that can be extracted from code, especially x86 code with its lack of registers, is pretty limited. Sure, for certain code sequences they can do more, but the universe of useful sequences that still can be optimized is getting smaller and more specialized. And nobody has come up with something new that promises radical increases in performance. If they have, no one has written a paper that I have found. So it looks like they will be concentrating on reducing the power requirements and throwing more cores at the problem. That's ok, we need more software that takes advantage of multiple threads. Lower power is a good thing, TDPs approaching 150 watts really complicate the engineering of systems and reduce long term reliability. But we won't be seeing a doubling of single thread performance every year or so like we used to.
So is the computer industry going to hit that long and painful slide to commoditization? Well, it has already to some extent. There are still a lot of things that can be done at the system level with specialized processors and what not to keep them out of the bubble pack at the checkout counter. And there is always Cell, an exciting idea that is deeply flawed in implementation. It is flawed because it breaks backward compatibility and is a bitch to program effectively. Both can probably be fixed, it just will take the right team with the right ideas. But it isn't there yet.
The K8 does have a lot of advantages over the P4 derivatives that Intel has. That will change with the new chips(NGA) that Intel has been talking about. AMD has some tricks up their sleeves also. So I suspect the market will be a lot more interesting than it has been for the last year or so. |
