Moore’s Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore’s Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.
So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore’s Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.
You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.
And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80’s which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.
Same curve.
Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.
The implication of, “That’s not Moore’s Law”, is that the observation isn’t valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.
Even if you’re technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.
Why aren’t we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren’t we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.
While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it’s actually more important/interesting than Moore’s Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.
Moore’s law factored in cost, not just what was physically possible.
The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.
About 5 years ago I pirated all the games ever normally published for my childhood gaming system and my friends different gaming system.
If I went to the past and told that to my younger self and that it all fits in a pinky finger nail sized medium, I wouldn’t have belived me. It’s just so far out there.
Yeah taken as a guideline and observation that computer speeds/storage/etc continue to improve, I think it’s fair. It may not always be double, but it is still significantly different than other physical processes which have “stagnated” by a similar metric (like top speed on an average vehicle or miles per gallon).
This is true, but…
Moore’s Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore’s Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.
So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore’s Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.
You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.
And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80’s which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.
Same curve.
Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.
The implication of, “That’s not Moore’s Law”, is that the observation isn’t valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.
Even if you’re technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.
Why aren’t we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren’t we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.
While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it’s actually more important/interesting than Moore’s Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.
Moore’s law factored in cost, not just what was physically possible.
About 5 years ago I pirated all the games ever normally published for my childhood gaming system and my friends different gaming system.
If I went to the past and told that to my younger self and that it all fits in a pinky finger nail sized medium, I wouldn’t have belived me. It’s just so far out there.
Yeah taken as a guideline and observation that computer speeds/storage/etc continue to improve, I think it’s fair. It may not always be double, but it is still significantly different than other physical processes which have “stagnated” by a similar metric (like top speed on an average vehicle or miles per gallon).