Moore's Law a "dangerous obsession", writer says

THERE'S A NICE article on Moore's Law at Red Herring magazine published earlier this week.

Titled Forget Moore's Law, the piece says that while the precept, forumulated by the co-founder of Intel Gordon Moore, holds true, sure enough, it's actually irrelevant to the future, a point that AMD CEO Hector Ruiz made some time ago.

The author, Michael S. Malone, says that Moore's Law has become unhealthy and an obsession, and dangerous. He says if we don't get off this train soon, "we may destroy an industry".

We think this argument has a lot of merit. While AMD and Intel push onwards with ever faster microprocessors, it's harder to find things to do with the extra performance, unless you're either an extreme gamer or use a PC for fantastically CPU intensive applications.

Our typing speed has stayed around 70 words a minute ever since we learned to type on an old Remington manual at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.

We're typing this piece on a 2GHz+ processor and the words don't come any quicker, despite having all that magnificent power driving the screen.

Pure speed doesn't seem to excite all but a few any more.

You can read the full article here. µ