Re:Ask HN: Why aren't we more scared of Moore's Law ending/s...
by ActorNightly on Thursday May 19, 2022 @05:00PM
(#31440106)
I don't think Moor Law applies anymore, because its based around general purpose CPUs - the idea that the faster that CPU is, the more compute you can do on it, which in turn implies you can solve harder problems. But this kinda implies sequential execution.
But going forward, it seems that the technological solutions that are able to be applied to solving real problems don't require massive compute as much as clever parallelism.
I.e, take something like running ML inference on a CPU. Now, instead of running it in on a CPU, you can build semi specialized hardware that runs at a fraction of the power required for the same unit of compute, because all the memory locations are deterministic, and there is way less moving data around, no circuitry to decode/reorder instructions, no branch prediction, e.t.c.
And then you can scale that hardware up as much as you need to give you width of compute, at the cost of additional power draw.
So there really is no need to develop faster and faster chips. Especially given that anything that functionally improves your day to day life (such as robotic servants for example), can run in the MHZ range with extreme accuracy, even KHz depending on the task.
But going forward, it seems that the technological solutions that are able to be applied to solving real problems don't require massive compute as much as clever parallelism.
I.e, take something like running ML inference on a CPU. Now, instead of running it in on a CPU, you can build semi specialized hardware that runs at a fraction of the power required for the same unit of compute, because all the memory locations are deterministic, and there is way less moving data around, no circuitry to decode/reorder instructions, no branch prediction, e.t.c.
And then you can scale that hardware up as much as you need to give you width of compute, at the cost of additional power draw.
So there really is no need to develop faster and faster chips. Especially given that anything that functionally improves your day to day life (such as robotic servants for example), can run in the MHZ range with extreme accuracy, even KHz depending on the task.