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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

Now assume that Moore's law stays healthy and in a few decades we're carrying around dojo-equivalent smart phones. Or implants. What do our apps do with all that compute? Detailed convincing AR, accurate real-time translation, identify almost any object in sight, turing-test passing answering machine. We'll be carrying around neural-net training hardware that is different than the stuff between our ears, often worse but sometimes much better. A cyber brain. Scary af.

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We will have 7 more layers of UI abstraction to solve the problem of not adequately warming the users hands as they use it during extreme winter weather caused by climate change.

Moore’s law is quite dead. Transistor density isn’t doubling. We’re still getting speed increases due to architectural improvements, but transistor density is capping out because thermals are a problem. That’s why you see these massive wafer designs and they’re not shrinking.

Both TSMC and Intel have transistor density increases on their process roadmaps, although they definitely aren't doubling.

> Transistor density isn’t doubling.

It pretty much continues to double: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#/media/File...

Raw transistor count isn't the same as density.

Sure, but if you look at the raw transistor count of a series of similarly sized dies (take Apple's A series for example), it holds up. It only doesn't hold up if you look at Intel the last 5 years. If you look at series' made on TSMC or Samsung, it holds up.

If you look at CPU performance relative to density as it has progressed over the last few decades, there's a clear decline in speed improvement. Denser only means faster to a point, regardless of Intel's process update failures.

Not sure what you’re replying to. The statement I’m replying to didn’t say anything about performance. It said “ Transistor density isn’t doubling.”

I have always looked at Moore's "law" as a proxy for performance, so I felt it was relevant, if tangential.

Moore’s law was about count, not density.

I mean, strictly speaking, you're technically correct. Informally, though, it's a proxy for transistor density.

It was about cost. https://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/Published_papers/Technology_ov...

Yes, count for optimum cost per transistor. So perhaps GP's statement was incomplete but not wrong.

> What do our apps do with all that compute? Detailed convincing AR, accurate real-time translation, identify almost any object in sight, turing-test passing answering machine. We'll be carrying around neural-net training hardware

Or more likely they'll spend the compute power on the latest JavaScript framework....

> What do our apps do with all that compute?

javascript

This isn’t far from the truth. But embrace it rather than feel upset by it. The world of programmers can be unlocked by a good API. And the underlying components can be C{,++}, as V8 is.

I wish I had your optimism. All I expect are better ways to deliver targeted advertising.

Based on current computing resource usage: ads.

Predict weather and issue an AR warning where to seek shelter from nearby tornado and a passing heat dome, all sponsored by your telecom and facilitated by facebook, of course.

Performance per watt is not improving that much, nor is feature size. You'll probably never be carrying around a supercomputer with this many FLOPS.

Even with reversible computing?

If we ever use reversible computing it won't look anything like this Tesla stuff, that's for sure.

Linear algebra is reversible if you nudge the matrixes so that the determinant is non-zero.

What about cloud services. A 5G connection to a supercomputer on demand.

You can have that now. That's now that the parent was hoping for.

If have a recent iPhone, you are carrying some special purpose neural net hardware around in your pocket already. I think this is a trend which is going to continue. First obvious application is, that speech recognition moves onto the phones themselves, no network required any more.

That's not a world I want to live in. Not even a little bit.

It's going to be really good at scanning your texts and photos to check they don't contain unacceptable content.

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