Moore's Law (which has grown in scope since Moore) applies to the aggregate effect of many technologies. Individual techs proceed in fits and starts.
well, specifically it applies to fields there the primary metric is a function of density. for instance, disk capacity is on an exponential, since it's a product of in-track and inter-track density. just like chips, where each linear shrink of 1/sqrt(2) leads to a doubling of devices in the same area.
in both cases, these curves are sometimes strongly modulated by "quantum" shifts in the technology (perhaps multi-gate transistors, or the succeeding generations of disk heads - perhaps patterned media upcoming.) in networking, I see generational shifts, but no area-driven exponential. so I think the application of moore's law to networking is mistaken...
Predictions about FLOPS/dollar seem to be sustainable, but e.g. I predict a jump in chip density when the price point of vapor deposition manufactured diamond gets low enough (diamond conducts heat way better than silicon, and chips are suffering from thermodynamics limits).
excellent example of a generational shift, rather than part of the relentless sequence of shrinks. (I guess you could argue that there are generational aspects to the shrink/area thing too, since, for instance,
visible-optical gave way to UV and presumably eventually immersion litho. or maybe it'll be imprint litho next.)
When AT&T divested, you could not get a decent telephone anymore; they were too expensive to make so well. Then after years of crummy phones, suddenly everyone had a cell-phone just like Captain Kirk's.
I guess that's more of an economic network effect. but am I alone in thinking that cellphones are one of the suckiest products on the market? (the phones themselves are OK; it's the bundling and customer-screwage I'm not fond of. imagine if your phone was an ipv6 device and contained an agent that simply negotiated quality*byte rates with whatever connectivity supplier happend to have good signal strength locally...)
Sure I want fiber optics to my house. But maybe the power company will carry data on the wasted bandwidth of power lines. Keep the faith :-)
call me an unrealistic idealist, but I'm hoping for wimax-like stuff (perhaps with some nice subversive/grassroots mesh routing) to eliminate the incredibly annoying cell monopolies. regards, mark. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
