End of Moore's law?

[Mark Komarinski]

On 7/11/2010 12:24 PM, Rich Braun wrote:
> The whole thing runs out of gas once enough consumers make the same decision
> that Stephen made:  what I have is good enough that I'll wait longer before
> making the effort to do an upgrade.
>    
Consumers aren't being driven by performance upgrades, but other 
reasons:  bigger screens, new OS, their current system broke, etc.  At 
best, consumer-grade systems are getting close to being like 
refrigerators or TVs or cars.  The one you have now works fine, but this 
year's models are out and they have things you think you need.  Remember 
that a large portion of the consumer market buys the entire system at 
one time and probably never cracks the case open.  If Word doesn't open 
in 15 seconds, they're going to want a new system.

I think we're also getting to a point where instead of each family 
having their own PC, you're seeing each family member having their own 
system.  They may be netbooks or laptops, but that will help drive sales 
over the next few years and provide greater upgrade opportunities 
('Sally's system died, so let's put on our coats and go to Best Buy' 'Yay!')
> What about corporate buyers?  I personally believe that industry innovations
> since the first TRS-80 came out 30+ years ago have been led primarily by
> consumers.  That trend continues today:  graphics adapters and subsystems are
> front-and-center where the action is, not just today but for the past few
> years.  VMware and its cousins can only go so far to drive demand on the
> corporate side.  At my own workplace, demand is coming not from our internal
> requirements but from--*consumers* who want to download more and more video.
>    

Nope.  In the days of the TRS-80 when general-purpose computers were 
rare, that was probably true.  It's a commodity item now.  Businesses 
are perfectly willing to buy a data center full of equipment to do 
whatever kind of processing they need.  Google started with 
off-the-shelf systems with no cases.  Sun was advertising a complete 
data center in a shipping crate.  There were news reports yesterday of 
how inexpensively the movie 'Despicable Me' was generated.  Think that 
when they start on 'Despicable Me 2' they'll use the same cluster?  Not 
a chance.  Clusters of systems are appearing everywhere for every 
purpose and that demand has not dropped, nor will it drop.  That means 
more systems with more cores in a smaller amount of space and that will 
continue to provide the revenue for AMD and Intel to keep battling it out.

The demand from your customers is for content, not performance.  A lowly 
Intel integrated GPU will be able to display YouTube content or other 
video on your screen as well as a $500 NVidia monster.  The reason that 
GPUs are advancing so quickly is because of gamers who want the latest 
and greatest (and that hasn't changed for 15 years) along with 
businesses who are finally able to take advantage of the specific 
processing power of the GPU (yay CUDA).  Even there, GPGPU support seems 
to be pretty spotty unless you're a programmer.  My users so far either 
don't have the skills to do it, or the applications they want to use 
don't support GPGPU yet.
> Once you have enough computer capacity in your house to drive roughly 5
> channels of 3-D HDTV to every room in the house, what else will you need?
>    
Content (and the massive amount of computing infrastructure that 
provides it)

-Mark