I thought this was going to be about silicon lottery.<p>Key points:<p>* For a new software approach to be recognized as valuable, it needs appropriate hardware to exist at the right time<p>* As Moore's law fades away, we can no longer rely on steady performance improvements for generalist CPUs, so specialized HW will make a comeback<p>An interesting note:<p>> Hardware is only economically vi-able if the lifetime of the use case lasts more than 3 years<p>I admit I stopped reading at section 5.
Papers Explained has a rebuttal of some of the points:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ89be_685o" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ89be_685o</a>
Interesting article, I enjoyed it. The HFT/low-latency community has been riding this insight for many years, they call it "mechanical sympathy" and tend to favour algos/data structures etc that are designed assumign a particular hardware architecture in mind.
Hardware and software co-evolve. But they are also co-evolving with the structure of our economy.<p>Today machine learning is used to inside servers to provide multiple responses at the same time.<p>This batching is because it's easier to gain more money by selling plenty of low quality decisions (ads), rather than a few good quality one.<p>But to grasp the bigger picture, there is also the fact that silicon chips are hard to develop in a DIY fashion. Our economic models have made it so that the whole silicon industry is based on trade secrets to create barriers and incremental improvements following Moore's Law for more than fifty years.<p>You see, to build a chip, you need to have everything perfect ; Pure sand crystals, dangerous chemicals, very small features. Everything engineered to the atom and orchestrated to perfection. It makes great product to sell for years.<p>But you see, this perfection has a price. Everything must lay flat in 2D. Everything must be built. And this is where the flash crash happen. Because the alternative route is vastly superior and evident in hindsight. So vastly superior and evident that the secret is harder to keep. We are even purging our biological ecosystem to keep the secret.<p>The technological future of computing is in self-assembling nano computing units. You tell the computer units how to build more of themselves. That's how nature has done it for millions of years. Science-fiction call them nanites. You can even reuse existing DNA factory. Or you can bootstrap from scratch. When you see that a typical virus is like 32kb. How can you imagine that with the right resources, you can't write a self generating 3D grey goo liquid.<p>If you need more computing power it's just a matter of giving it more energy and material. Chemistry scales a lot better. And in the battle of exponential curves, it's a winner takes all market.<p>Computing power is a resource the same way oil, rare-earth minerals, steel are. It has been managed to be kept under control for fifty years. You need to understand that there is a balance to be strike between enjoying the benefits of technology and the stability of the economy.<p>That's why Moore's law died, we killed it to keep control.
I've always felt that vliw might have been a victim of this. I'm not super knowledgeable on it though, apart from being familiar with the disaster that was itanium.
Calling the progression and availability of technology a “lottery” is definitely a confusing term. It implies concepts totally unrelated with how hardware development actually works.<p>Hardware and software co-evolve! There is no such thing as people creating hardware ex-nihilo. This reads more like a researcher venting about his limited budget and development capacities.