RE: Paul Graham's PyCon Keynote & The Programmer's Apprentice

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <address@hidden>]

Christopher Barber wrote:

> Of course, Moore's law will not hold.  The rate of doubling of the
> amount of transisters you can fit on a chip has slowed since Moore's
> original observation.  It is quite possible that the growth could
> hit a brick wall at some point in the future.  Of course, computers
> could become faster for other reasons, such as increased
> parallelism.

Or they could choose to not become faster but instead more useful.
We're seeing this with the new Intel chipset -- I forget its name, the
one that sounds like a brand of spaghetti.  It is somewhat clever of
Intel to recognize that customers notice features, not innards, and
therefore market it as if it were about WiFi.

> Thus it will be latency rather than CPU power that will increasingly
> be the bounding factor in computer performance.

And the ability to dissipate heat ...

Shriram