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Moore’s Law Isn’t Dead: It’s Wrong – Long Live Wright’s Law

7 pointsby hairytrogalmost 6 years ago

1 comment

dredmorbiusalmost 6 years ago
I&#x27;d suggest instead that an understanding of underlying mechanisms is required.<p>Moore&#x27;s law is predicated on the physical density of transistors on silicon. Constant linear die advances, driven largely by CAD and silicon modelling tools, themselves computationally bounded, deliver square-factor density improvements, to the limits of materials physics.<p>Wright&#x27;s law concerns <i>process</i> improvements, on already physically-bounded products, such as aircraft. Pilot, payload, fuel, and airframe limitations bound the reduction in scale, absent quantum leaps in capabilities: nuclear warheads reduce city-flattening missions from bomber fleets to single aircraft, automation and remote control eliminate pilots, &quot;smart&quot; weapons reduce payload sizes as well.<p>But otherwise, the bounding space is the domain complexity itself: components and interactions, with functional limits ad interactions. Understanding of these comes incrementally, and tends to be dominated by institutional rather than computational information processing, cf Boeing&#x27;s massive blunders in the 737-Max design.<p>This process doesn&#x27;t lend itself to the exonential capacity-doubling of Moore&#x27;s law, but rather a cost-reduction function that asymptotically approaches a lower bound.<p>(Red line in this plot: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;thumb&#x2F;4&#x2F;4f&#x2F;US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT%2C_VMT%2C_per_capita%2C_and_total_annual_deaths.png&#x2F;1200px-US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT%2C_VMT%2C_per_capita%2C_and_total_annual_deaths.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;thumb&#x2F;4&#x2F;4f&#x2F;US...</a>)<p>Also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thetruthaboutcars.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;04&#x2F;chart-of-the-day-why-have-road-fatalities-declined&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thetruthaboutcars.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;04&#x2F;chart-of-the-day-w...</a><p>A related phenomenon is auto safety improvements, expressed as deaths per million passenger miles, plotted from 1915-2015. There is no massive jump as one might expect with the introduction of safety belts (as they were called) in the 1950s, crash-test standards in the 1970s, airbags in the 1990s, or ABS and auto-steer in the 2010s, but rather a strongly consistent halving about every 20 years. With one exception; the halving period was <i>ten</i> years, in the first decade of data.