*It's been a huge driving force for transformation for half a century. It'll be odd when the chips just stop getting better. Cheaper, yeah, more profitable for people with economic clout, yeah, actually better at computing, no.
*The comparison with jet aircraft is quite interesting. Faster? Nope? More efficient? A little. More streamlined? Sort of. Beset with bogus security-theater worldwide? You bet.
http://www.nature.com/news/the-chips-are-down-for-moore-s-law-1.19338
The chips are down for Moore’s law
The semiconductor industry will soon abandon its pursuit of Moore's law.
by M. Mitchell Waldrop (((a guy who generally knows what he's writing about)))
09 February 2016
(((First: it's hard to squeeze more performance out of tiny components; worse yet, the richest and most successful tech companies no longer need to do it. Market economics is beating engineering and physics.)))
(…)
"Going mobile
"The second stumbling block for Moore's law was more of a surprise, but unfolded at roughly the same time as the first: computing went mobile.
"Twenty-five years ago, computing was defined by the needs of desktop and laptop machines; supercomputers and data centres used essentially the same microprocessors, just packed together in much greater numbers. Not any more. Today, computing is increasingly defined by what high-end smartphones and tablets do — not to mention by smart watches and other wearables, as well as by the exploding number of smart devices in everything from bridges to the human body. And these mobile devices have priorities very different from those of their more sedentary cousins.
"Keeping abreast of Moore's law is fairly far down on the list — if only because mobile applications and data have largely migrated to the worldwide network of server farms known as the cloud. Those server farms now dominate the market for powerful, cutting-edge microprocessors that do follow Moore's law. “What Google and Amazon decide to buy has a huge influence on what Intel decides to do,” says Reed.
"Much more crucial for mobiles is the ability to survive for long periods on battery power while interacting with their surroundings and users. The chips in a typical smartphone must send and receive signals for voice calls, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the Global Positioning System, while also sensing touch, proximity, acceleration, magnetic fields — even fingerprints. On top of that, the device must host special-purpose circuits for power management, to keep all those functions from draining the battery.
"The problem for chipmakers is that this specialization is undermining the self-reinforcing economic cycle that once kept Moore's law humming. “The old market was that you would make a few different things, but sell a whole lot of them,” says Reed. “The new market is that you have to make a lot of things, but sell a few hundred thousand apiece — so it had better be really cheap to design and fab them.” (…)
