Linus Torvalds worries about how Linux will handle end of Moore’s Law
'Perhaps the most hotly anticipated event at LinuxCon was this morning's kernel developer panel featuring none other than Linux creator Linus Torvalds. In the panel, Torvalds said he's worried the possible end of Moore's Law might finally be within sight, providing challenges to both hardware and software developers. "On the five- to 10-year timeframe scale, I'm very interested to see how the industry actually reacts to the fact that soon we will come against some physical limits," Torvalds said. "People used to be talking about having thousands of cores on one die because it keeps shrinking, and those people clearly have no idea about physics because we won't be shrinking for much longer."' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/linus-torvalds-worries... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
On 20/09/13 09:11, Peter Reutemann wrote:
'Perhaps the most hotly anticipated event at LinuxCon was this morning's kernel developer panel featuring none other than Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
Moore's Law has been an exponential phenomenon, exceeded only by the rate of increase of CPU, memory and disk-sucking bloat in the software. It's always annoyed me to put down hard cash on fresh hardware, then enjoy reasonably good performance for a year or so, only to have the self-same hardware slow down to the point of near-uselessness, more and more with each software upgrade. The end of Moore's Law might not be a bad thing. For one thing, it will bring in a new era of optimisation. For another, it will have positive environmental effects, with more computation per kilowatt hour, and less hardware turnover. It will push developers into giving their stacks a good cleanout, refurbishing them into simple and elegant frameworks, rather than adding yet more resource-wasting layers. Cheers David
participants (2)
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David McNab -
Peter Reutemann