Author: Anthony Cozzie
Date: 11:31:10 01/13/05
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On January 13, 2005 at 13:41:12, Dann Corbit wrote: >I want to say something clearly. > >I cannot possibly prove that chess will be solved even one billion years from >now. > >I cannot possibly prove that chess compute power will double every year. > >I cannot possibly prove that memory storage techology will double space every >year. > >We have seen in the past that this is a trend, and the trend has continued for >150 years or so. > >But this is an argument from induction and not deduction. It is like a man who >sees a white duck every morning for 6 years. He looks out his window and sees >flocks and flocks of white ducks. And so he concludes (sensibly) that ducks are >white. But induction can never prove a thing, because it is only a projection >based on past experience and not any sort of a proof. Someday, he may see a >mallard duck and it will spoil his whole theory. > >Therefore, anyone else's opinion is just as good as mine about it. > >And any sort of projection of the future is always a guess. For instance, I may >see that my shoe is untied and decide to tie it. What is the probability that >my shoe will get tied? Before the action occurs, it is something less than one. > >There may be an asteroid that strikes at my lat/lon just as I bend over to tie >it. And so all projections of the future (which are clearly made with imperfect >knowledge) are only educated guesses at best. > >In a sense, it is like arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a >pin. Moore's Law is _dead_. I don't think this is in question any more. Even at .13u we saw considerable gains, but EVERYONE is having problems with 90nm: AMD, IBM, Intel, TSMC . . the list goes on. The power requirements are just too high. In terms of MHz, you can buy a 2.4GHz Opteron today. Last year you could buy a 2.0GHz Opteron. We are just not going to see the performance gains from processors that we saw in past. Now, this doesn't mean that we won't see other techniques. There are a lot of interesting things on the horizon: IRAM, multiple cores, reconfigurable chips, VPGA, etc. But none of these are going to provide the speed increases we have seen in the past. Of course, there are also completely non-silicon possibilities as well. Quantum computing. Biological computing. None of that stuff is going to be on my desk in the next 10 years, though. Kurzweil has some sound arguments: the more people on the planet, the more cool ideas we'll come up with. But we have just about maxxed out the CMOS superscalar processor. anthony
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