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The end of Moore

22nd February 2019

By: Terry Mackenzie-hoy

     

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There are certainly some of you who have never seen a transistor or held one in your hand. Few will have ever made an electronic circuit using transistors.

Briefly, a transistor is an electronic switch that can turn on and off very quickly. It can also act as an amplifier to change a small electrical signal to a large signal that can be fed to a loudspeaker. It is in the matter of the switch that is part of this discussion. Instead of wiring a whole lot of transistors together to make a computer, the manufacturers incorporate them into a small single package that we know as a ‘silicon chip’, or ‘chip’, for short.

The chips developed rapidly and became more complex, leading to the creation of ‘Moore’s Law’, which is named after Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel, a chip maker. Moore observed in 1965 that transistors were shrinking so fast that, every year, twice as many could fit onto a chip and, in 1975, adjusted the pace to a doubling every two years. This state of affairs continued until fairly recently, when it became evident that the number of transistors that could be on a chip had a finite limit as transistor sizes were approaching 10 nanometres (a nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre). The way forward seems unclear, but what is true is that top supercomputers are not getting faster at the rate they used to.

It is quite a thought. What may happen is that computers will be programmed to recognise familiar problems and generate solutions that seem appropriate to the problem, based on past history.

However, I am not going to go on and on about this – I have been around since computers were programmed with Hollerith punched cards and I am placed, like many my age, at a viewpoint which surveys from IBM 360 (has 360 KB of memory, occupied a building the size of a small aircraft hangar) to a 3.2 GHz desktop with 32 GB of memory. As I survey this field of computer history, I have now perfected a law that trumps Moore’s Law: it is Machoy’s Law and states, quite simply: “It makers no difference how many transistors are on a chip – the program response speeds will never get faster.” There is also the corollary to Machoy’s Law: “It makers no difference how many transistors are on a chip – Microsoft programs will always waste your time.”

To back this up, I offer the following: Go to the file manger on your computer. Click on any Microsoft Word file. See how long it takes to load. A few seconds, bru. Try the same with an Excel file. Also a few seconds. Then, once in a Microsoft Word document, try to set the tab stops. You will find that whoever designed the program had never used a typewriter, since it takes a long time to register the stops. Delay delay. I can tell you, from my vast viewpoint, when computers ran on DOS, they started up faster and ran faster, and the programs were more accurate. One has to ask: Why, with all these transistors being packed into a chip, has the programming not followed suit? We have been using Microsoft programs in my practice since 1995 and it has been downhill ever since. Every program has a new type of fault.

I think that, since Windows 2, the philosophy of Microsoft has been to produce software which is slow, has bugs, is error prone and just ignore the problems created since, honestly, we have very little alternative to Windows. One can try Linux but it really does not have enough features. And thus it is. Computerwise, we are still in the paradigm whereby one has to shut up and put up. Moore’s Law is dead, Machoy’s Law lives.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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