Software Needs to Heed Moore's Law

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Rich Tate

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Folks at Intel and Microsoft are saying that now is the time to start thinking about moving software programming to the next level in order to continue performance and innovation strides.

"The software has to also start following Moore's law," Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said, referring to the notion that chips offer roughly double the performance every 18 months to two years. "Software has to double the amount of parallelism that it can support every two years."
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So yeah, did Intel basically just call out the software industry and tell them it's now mostly their responsibility to see that Moore's Law continues? Awesome.
 
Moore's Law is a law in the sense that gravity is a law, not like a speed limit or something. If it actually is a (scientific) law it doesn't need to be enforced, it just is. Basically all they are saying is that Moore's law doesn't hold true for the software industry, but it was never intended to in the first place. It also is not a true law in reference to hardware either, just and observed phenomenon that will likely change in the future.
 
CodeX said:
Moore's Law is a law in the sense that gravity is a law, not like a speed limit or something. If it actually is a (scientific) law it doesn't need to be enforced, it just is. Basically all they are saying is that Moore's law doesn't hold true for the software industry, but it was never intended to in the first place. It also is not a true law in reference to hardware either, just and observed phenomenon that will likely change in the future.
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Yeah, I'm very familiar with the concept of Moore's Law, I was merely pointing out the amazing presumption Intel is making. Basically since they can't keep scaling clock speed to follow Moore's Law like they used to, they're telling software devs that it's their job to keep up the pace by programming for their multi-core processors. Given, Intel has no choice, because growth from here on out is mainly parallel, but still, telling the software industry that the pressure is now on them just strikes me as classy.
 
FoolOnTheHill said:
Yeah, I'm very familiar with the concept of Moore's Law, I was merely pointing out the amazing presumption Intel is making. Basically since they can't keep scaling clock speed to follow Moore's Law like they used to, they're telling software devs that it's their job to keep up the pace by programming for their multi-core processors. Given, Intel has no choice, because growth from here on out is mainly parallel, but still, telling the software industry that the pressure is now on them just strikes me as classy.
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maybe, but it is necessary. alot of software had gotten bloated, relying on the next fast processor to make it work fast enough.
 
Software performance doubling every two year is not Moore's Law. Moore said that the amount of transistors used on a chip doubles every two years. Which is not quite the same thing as performance.
 
Glacian22 said:
Software performance doubling every two year is not Moore's Law. Moore said that the amount of transistors used on a chip doubles every two years. Which is not quite the same thing as performance.
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Yes, this is true, but over the years, many have distorted the meaning of Moore's Law into performance doubling. While not the original intent, it has been used so much that it's practically another accepted meaning of Moore's Law. In fact, if you ask a lot of people for the definition, I'm betting you'd get performance doubling as a common response.
 
FoolOnTheHill said:
Yes, this is true, but over the years, many have distorted the meaning of Moore's Law into performance doubling. While not the original intent, it has been used so much that it's practically another accepted meaning of Moore's Law. In fact, if you ask a lot of people for the definition, I'm betting you'd get performance doubling as a common response.
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Yeah, that's true, it just annoys me sometimes :p
 
Somehow I think this has more to do with hardware makers wanting more stuffed software so they can say that you need to buy their hardware. If software makers were truely innovative, there would be no need for transistor doubling every year, outside of gaming at least.
 
Rich Tate said:
Folks at Intel and [B}Microsoft[/B] are saying that now is the time to start thinking about moving software programming to the next level in order to continue performance and innovation strides.
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:rolleyes: Of course...Microsoft needs folks to continue buying bloated Operating Systems and Office Products...
 
In my experience if a piece of hardware isn't functioning as it supposed to to then generally its the shitty software that is running on it . The cpu makers have everyright to call on software makers to start actually make better use of dual core cpu's for example . No wonder when a piece of firmware gets hacked people come to produce far better use of it then what the manufacter did .
Also i'd say virtually every bluescreen i've ever had was related to some shit coding and not a hardware failure.
 
I thought software did follow a type of "Moor's law". The amount of code in a application doubles every 18 months. This is why as processors get faster your computer does not. It an interesting topic actually and it has many aspects. FYI This post is slightly tongue in cheek.
 
More powerful hardware means more crappy unrefined software slowing it down.
 
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