Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

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Do you think that "FLOPS/OPS/whatever per year" will slow down or speed up now that Moore's law is ending? Ie do you think that the hardware/architecture/software combo will accelerate more now, or less?

If you think it will accelerate more while hardware gains drop to zero, why were we leaving these absolutely massive gains on the table? This means that, if a new processor gave us double the speed, we could get more than double just from software alone and get the hardware doubling on top of that.

If you think it will decelerate, why are you happy Moore's Law ends? We're worse off than we were before, even though we aren't "lazy" now.

This approach seems to me a bit like saying "Oh I'm happy I lost my job, now I can finally make money by looking for pennies on the ground all day, which the job made me too lazy to do".

It is also possible we are in a local optimum and there are huge performance or efficiency or other kind of gains available, but to realize them investments in radically different architectures need to be made, and those are not economical while existing approaches can be improved.

This is exactly my perspective. Existing ISAs have a de facto stranglehold on the mindset around computer architecture because they could provide a consistent foundation while the underlying implementation got better and better faster than anyone could build something on top of it.

There have been plenty of small experiments in other architectures but never enough of a mindshare investment to really evaluate viability and performance of alternatives. There are costs to a more diversified architecture eco-system, sure, but I fully believe we will find more value in that space than we have so far taken advantage of.

ASIC implementation of a PLC, anyone?

By ending, they are absolutely referring to it slowing down.

It probably means we're worse off, in that spending on software engineering to get gains rather than expecting it out of new hardware processes will almost certainly be more expensive. On the other hand, software gains give us more computing with the same energy which is a good thing for the planet.

OPS might speed up, while FLOPS will slow down :)

By FLOPS I mean the classical FP64, while OPS can be any bit width, even 1 bit.

Some of us liked looking for pennies. Watching the world burn so I get lauded rather than ridiculed for micro optimizations is a small price to pay.

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