Moore's law has hit the wall

[shooter]

Capt'n It can't be done, the silicon crystal is at it's limits 
 No more transistors: The end of Moore’s law (interestingengineering.com)

[Colas LeGrippa]

I wish I had crystal instead of silicone around my bath tub, it would probably stay clean longer
..

[PRR]

Recycled news.

[shooter]

 
i don't get out much 

[reidgw]

It may be old news but it's still fascinating. Been keeping up with the new tricks the R&D depts. have been trying. Stacking transistors seems like it will stave off total stagnation for Intel but only for a short time. AMD was looking at Infinity Fabric - basically allowing different chipsets to talk directly to memory and increasing bandwidth.

If computers had gone down the path of Amiga, we would arguably all have systems 10X as powerful as we do now 

We need some Dilithium!!! 

[shooter]

read an article on layering graphene and boron, exhibited superconducting properties at room temp.  If you can move electrons "instantly" from point A to B, distance becomes irrelevant. the Quantum stuff is like Murphy's stuff though, keeps the smart kids in check 

[Rontone]

If computers had gone down the path of Amiga, we would arguably all have systems 10X as powerful as we do now 

What were Amiga doing differently?

This just reminded me I have my old Acorn A3000 in a cupboard that needs a service, and a copy of Elite still in its box...

[reidgw]

What were Amiga doing differently?

This just reminded me I have my old Acorn A3000 in a cupboard that needs a service, and a copy of Elite still in its box...

Well the first big difference was price. You could have a 16 or 32 bit Amiga for about 1/3 the cost of an 8 or 16 bit pc respectively. The second was that Amigas had a gui called Workbench which was absolutely beautiful and functional. The third and biggest was that they were designed so every facet had its own coprocessor that worked independently from the main cpu instead of being slaved to the cpu  as in a pc. Independednt audio, video, I/O, etc so the cpu could do what ir was meant to do and crunch data. This made them WAY WAY WAAAAY outperform everyone at the time and they were multimedia monsters for music, video, raytracing and 3D graphics while the rest of the world was still struggling with Windows 3.1.

It might be hard to believe but those antique computers are still used today for video rendering. They have an insane cult following in Germany. It just goes to show that building a better product doesn't guarantee success. A good marketing team can sell snow to an Eskimo and that's just sad IMO 
I miss my Amiga 500

[shooter]

~ 10yrs ago I dug out my old Commodore 128.  She booted up like it was 1990 
That was my hackers computer.  I created clones of games, had 5 floppies full of tools, from keystroke capture to bit copy of pretty much any storage device, dis-assemblers, assemblers, fun times i NEVER want to repeat 


I passed it off to a Barista working on his final year as a computer engineer. He got it wired up to a flat screen, his buddy's loved all the games. 
2 floppies, tape storage, acoustic modem 300 baud, plug in 600 baud, prom burner/reader/eraser, monitor, A/D - D/A convertor

[reidgw]

Had a buddy whose uncle wrote demos for the C64. He had every game imaginable. We played Castle of Dr. Creep and M.U.L.E. until our eyes bled    such a cool system. Man, the demos still blow my mind.

[reidgw]

Hey Shooter, they're scrambling again 

https://semiengineering.com/transistors-reach-tipping-point-at-3nm/

[shooter]

 
I just installed a Cobra 29 CB radio, I'm heading backward fast as I can! 
Got me a comfortable chair to watch mankind pass by 

[acheld]

If computers had gone down the path of Amiga, we would arguably all have systems 10X as powerful as we do now 

Apologies for the delayed response.   

Computing DID go down the Amiga path.   Acorn was forerunner of ARM, the basis of most cellphone processors, as well as current generation Apple computers. 

So yeah, while Intel dithered with CISC processors due to backward compatibility concerns, RISC processors overtook the world in the long run.  I think ARM based processors are the most commonly used processors now.  By far.

And yeah, I had an Acorn back in the day -- wish I had kept it. 

[reidgw]

Acheld, i was speaking about the home pc market, but I do see that things are heading that way now. In the past, IBM and clones just put band aid on top of band aid because they won the home pc war and we were stuck with their less powerful design. Apple is definitely more on the right track but their prices can be insulting lol.

[PRR]

Moore's law has hit the wall

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/14/apple_m1_opinion_column/

Take some raw numbers. The Mac Studio Ultra starts at $4k. It weighs about 4 kilograms. It has a 400 watt power supply. It can clock up around 20 TFLOPS – twenty million million floating point operations a second, if you're feeling blasé – thanks to its M1 Ultra SoC, one of the highest performing devices in mainstream computing.

The Mac Studio Ultra is vastly superior to the world's fastest supercomputer from 2001, IBM's one-off ASCI White. That cost $170m, weighed over 100,000 kilograms, took six megawatts in processing and cooling, and produced a paltry 12 TFLOPS.

Do the sums to combine everything that's better in FLOPS per kilo per watt per dollar, and the Mac Studio Ultra is twenty million million times ahead of ASCI White. Plus you can buy it online, it runs Netflix, and it's too small for your cat to sit on.

42,000 times cheaper, 25,000 times lighter, 15,000 times less power, almost twice the speed, in 21 years.

Moore predicted something like 16,000 times better? We are doing fine, in some way.