17 Jan
2017
17 Jan
'17
7:09 p.m.
On 11 Jan 2017, at 18:34, Steve Johnson <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote:
IMHO, hardware has left software in the dust. I figured out that if cars had evolved
since 1970 at the same rate as computer memory, we could now buy 1,000 Tesla Model
S's for a penny, and each would have a top speed of 60,000 MPH. This is roughly a
factor of a trillion in less than 50 years.
This doesn't mean that the process will continue: eventually you hit physics limits
('engineering' is really a better term, but it has been so degraded by
'software engineering' that I don't like to use it). Obviously we've
already hit those limits for clock speed (when?) and we might be close to them for
single-threaded performance in general: the current big (HPC big) machine where I work has
both lower clock speed than the previous one and observed lower single-threaded
performance as well, although its a lot more scalable, at least in theory. The previous
one was POWER, and was I think the slightly mad very-high-clock-speed POWER chip, which
might turn out to be the high-water-mark of single-threaded performance; the current one
is x86.
Obviously for a while parallel scaling will mean things continue, but that crashes into
other limits as well.
I think we've all lived in a wonderful time where it seemed like various exponential
processes could continue for ever: they can't.
--tim