Better, faster, stronger? Tech titans’ obsession with turbocharged computer power could be our downfall
John NaughtonFirst there was Moore’s law, now the Nvidia boss has upped the ante. It’s all fuelling a dangerous conviction that everything can be solved by technology
“Some” things can be solved by technology. So, let’s have more and faster tech to solve those that can be so solved, also, to find out which can be so solved.
He’s also wrong in detail:
Even so, it turned out to be an accurate prediction of how the business of making silicon chips would evolve. Since transistor density is correlated with processing power, what it meant was that computing power doubled every year until about 2010, after which it began to level off somewhat, largely because of the physical limits on the density of transistors that could be fitted on to a tiny rectangle. (Although it hasn’t prevented Apple from getting 19bn of them on the A17 chip inside my iPhone.)
Bollocks. It’s because the rise of cellphones meant that more processing power was devoted to such things as power management and comms. What we used the processing power for cchanged, not the advance in processing power.
Sigh. And this man has a major tech column….
These things happen when a Graun scribbler ventures out from the green pastures of feelz and blunders into the harsh rocks of reality…
I agree with him but not for the reason he gives.
Technology was great when it first came out. Productivity improvements, gaming and automation. Once that was over which was about 30+ years ago it started to be used against us and now it is a nightmare. Can’t think of anything good coming out from all the latest advances except Orwellian surveillance and state control.
Cotton titans’ obsession with watercharged loom power could be our downfall.
Railway titans’ obsession with coalcharged steam power could be our downfall.
Fire titans’ obsession with woodcharged cooking power could be our downfall…..
The Guardian. They’re been beyond crap on computer/computing reporting since before the Beeb came out. I remember reading their articles in 1981-ish and back then wondering if they had any actual contact with the real world.
“Bollocks. It’s because the rise of cellphones meant that more processing power was devoted to such things as power management and comms. What we used the processing power for cchanged, not the advance in processing power.”
Phones and laptops, largely (although we now have long battery life, high speed machines). Servers are optimised for cost of processing, so there are still CPUs made for speed.
One thing in all this – there’s a lot more than Moore’s law to performance. Like SSDs, like Apple’s M series machines combining things on a single die. Like more memory in a machine. The more memory you have, the less your database engine has to go back to the disk. And memory has more than halved in price in 5 years. I don’t know why. Could be more transistors on there, could be just that we got more competition, better manufacturing processes. Doesn’t matter. It means people can buy more of it, which gives them higher performance computing. And chips in general. If they get cheaper, you just build a larger warehouse. The Chinese are making all these RISC-V chips now.
Us programmers could start doing things with Rust, too. It’s been cheaper to stick with Java, Python, C# but if you want better performance, code in Rust.
“Bollocks. It’s because the rise of cellphones meant that more processing power was devoted to such things as power management and comms. What we used the processing power for cchanged, not the advance in processing power.”
Not really… Mobile equipment has *sufficient* processing power to do what a phone/tablet needs to do.
Which is mainly media consumption, really. The power management *is* there because the comms and screen tend to eat up quite a bit of battery, but doesn’t require all that much computing power.
The Real Deal™ in computing power ( and thus power consumption..) isn’t in the processor anyway, not anymore.
It’s in the graphics cards/chips. And has been for close to three decades or so.
“… more processing power was devoted to such things as power management…”. Which is why it is possible to use smaller batteries which need charging less frequently and charge quicker.
This confuses the Net Zeroids who believe battery development will solve range and charging issues in BEVs just like it did in smart phones and tablets. It didn’t.
Pay no heed to anyone who prattles about “turbocharged” in any but the literal sense.
Moore’s ‘Law’ started to run out of steam a decade ago. Although chip features continued to shrink, they were just used to put 8/16/32 CPUs onto a single chip. This is great for servers, which are naturally expected to deal with dozens/hundreds/thousands of threads simultaneously, but not so great for workstations, where processes are still frequently single-threaded. Actual CPU speeds have been stuck at 4GHz for at least a decade – we should really have 64GHz processors now, but the problem is the silicon would melt 🙂
@ Marius
Yep, the spinning jenny was the pinnacle of technology for the luddites.