Re:The chips are down for Moore’s law
by marcosdumay on Friday February 12, 2016 @08:26AM
(#11086970)
Well, you came out with a great example. Cars are one product with a very visible evolution, and expensive enough for slowing this evolution down so it could be documented. How much are the 1915 cars better than the 1900 ones? I'd venture a guess at the hundreds of times.
Film cameras are at the cheap/fast evolving end, so I wouldn't expect to see most of the in lab models documented. Yet, the first released ones were very reliable - I doubt the first prototyped ones were so.
Thermal machines and watches were two examples of products that were slowed down by economical factors. Different economical factors than semiconductors, so they didn't got that the smooth exponential development.
Can you name any of those industries? Because most (if not all) industries and products I know, aside of IT, have none such "super-exponential" improvements at their beginnings, not even exponential ones year over year.
We don't have 100x better cars than in 1950.
Film cameras didn't get x better in their first years -- it was a slow and painful evolution that lasted decades to get to something like the 35mm film and standardized functionality.
We don't have 10x better air-conditioning, watches, guitars, etc.
The only places I can think of where that holds are things like memory, storage, CPUs, GPUs etc -- all IT related. And maybe batteries, though I doubt it.