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Comment by larkeith | Hacker News Reader

Oh goody, it's time for the annual 'End of Moore's Law' article.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0375960102...

However the argument of this article is not just that Moore's Law is ending but that it will "bring about a golden new era of computer architecture".

Nothing particularly golden about rearranging a given number of beads on a table. The only gains from cellular architectures is how many cells on a mesh you can get on a given piece of real estate.

What's left is wafer scale integration and stacking. And, making the cells smaller, which is not a silicon design problem but computer science brain damage problem.

Reminds me of IPv4 address space exhaustion articles of the past.

Thankfully Hollywood got that figured out for us by simply using all the adresses above 256.

That's gotta finally happen SOME day, no?? I speak seriously.... Of course, by the time it happens, I wouldn't be surprised if we come up with a solution that people like better than IPv6?

Out of curiosity, what do people dislike about IPv6? I know next to nothing about networking, but it all I've observed from people against IPv6 is that it looks weird. It's downfall seems to be that we're so embedded into IPv4.

So ignoring IPv4, what is the problem with IPv6?

I was hoping we were still slowly making the switch. In the same way that the modern web took ages, but eventually adapted to update browsers more than once a decade and now it's reasonable to use modern JS features. I didn't give up hope on the "modern" web features.. should I give up hope on IPv6?

It's above most people's memorisation threshold, more than just looking weird. But the real limitation seems to be that nobody wants to make a change which has no benefit for them - and so long as you can still access all you need, there's no benefit to switching over to IPv4.

And ISPs are holding us up too.

The 128 bit addresses seem overkill where 64 is plenty.

It happened already. And nothing changed.

>And nothing changed.

It sort of has.

We've shifted a lot of computing to the back-end where we can use more servers. We're using alternative architectures that can be built into chips that are more efficient for some workloads, e.g. ARM. We're using GPUs and now TPUs for compute-intensive tasks like machine learning that can benefit from them. It's not clear to what degree we'll be able to replace process scaling with other approaches but certainly things will change with chips unable to just get denser/faster at a predictable rate any longer.

I fail to see the connection to the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space.

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