[outcast]

I'd like to see proof it can improve yields of food in a way which increases carrying capacity. There's more to carrying capacity than food, of course.

Ok, what exactly do you want? How does increasing yields while at the same time not requiring large amounts of fertilizers and pesticides be used somehow not equate to being able to feed more people?

My point of view, as someone who has studied farming for over a decade, is that GM crops aren't necessary, and are a waste of time, money, energy, and attention. They are an inelegant solution to a problem, in my opinion.

Ok, do you have evidence that they aren't necessary and are a waste of time, etc?

[Carlhole]

...is another dead idea.

IBM's breakthrough chip technology lights the path to exascale computing

The new technology, called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics, is the result of a decade of development at IBM's global Research laboratories. The patented technology will change and improve the way computer chips communicate – by integrating optical devices and functions directly onto a silicon chip, enabling over 10X improvement in integration density than is feasible with current manufacturing techniques.

IBM anticipates that Silicon Nanophotonics will dramatically increase the speed and performance between chips, and further the company's ambitious Exascale computing program, which is aimed at developing a supercomputer that can perform one million trillion calculations—or an Exaflop—in a single second. An Exascale supercomputer will be approximately one thousand times faster than the fastest machine today.

The density of optical and electrical integration demonstrated by IBM's new technology is unprecedented – a single transceiver channel with all accompanying optical and electrical circuitry occupies only 0.5mm2 – 10 times smaller than previously announced by others. The technology is amenable for building single-chip transceivers with area as small as 4x4mm2 that can receive and transmit over Terabits per second that is over a trillion bits per second.

[vision-master]

Now if only they can light up a big splif and figure out something useful for all this power other than making digital dollars faster. Maybe they can connect employees directly into this new system and monitor all thoughts and actions.

[Sixstrings]

Moore's Law is pretty well established.. barring a total lights-out "world made by hand" situation, Moore's Law will stand.

Anyone who's been alive for the last forty years has seen Moore's Law in action first hand, computers and personal electronics getting smaller and more powerful year after year. Don't mean to sound like a cornucopian, just recognizing reality.

[The_Toecutter]

Moore's Law does have physical limitations. It will not be possible to make a transistor smaller than an atom, for example.

Our computer technology will probably begin to be restricted in growth due to physical limitations within the next 20-25 years. IMB has already demonstrated using xenon atoms held on a magnetic grid to spell out its name; we will see if someday this results in the fastest possible processor or most dense hard drive physically possible.

[Keith_McClary]

Moore's Law does have physical limitations
...
Our computer technology will probably begin to be restricted in growth due to physical limitations within the next 20-25 years.

What happens when computers stop shrinking?

Around 2020 or soon afterward, Moore's law will gradually cease to hold true and Silicon Valley may slowly turn into a rust belt unless a replacement technology is found. Transistors will be so small that quantum theory or atomic physics takes over and electrons leak out of the wires. For example, the thinnest layer inside your computer will be about five atoms across. At that point, according to the laws of physics, the quantum theory takes over.
...
-Excerpted from Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku Copyright (c) 2011 by Michio Kaku.

Michio Kaku is a professor of physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, a co-founder of string field theory and the author of several science books.

[jedrider]

IBM's breakthrough chip technology lights the path to exascale computing

So the results of all this "breakthrough" technology is to allow us to more clearly see our eventual demise!!

The answer '42' comes to light, the number of deer remaining on that Island after die-off!

I always thought we were making 'progress' until I realized we are really still mostly powered by burning 'coal'. But, what cool devices to distract us!

[smiley]

What is funny is that Moore's law isn't a law. It actually is an industry guideline.

Every semi device or equipment manufacturer has the IRTS roadmap on its wall (http://www.itrs.net/). This is basically a detailed version of Moore's law.

With this roadmap they exactly know, which node to deliver at what point in time, and can start technological development years in advance.Without it would be a complete mess because a node shift requires hundreds of suppliers and developers to deliver a technology step at the same time. It is amazing to see a whole worldwide industry working in unity to obtain that common goal.

Moores law works IMO because humans when they get their act together can achieve pretty amazing things. If only they acted in the same way on energy.

Will Moore's law hold? I don't know. Moore's law was already becoming problematic 5 years ago with the advance of parallel processing. For logic the benefits of further shrink are not really apparent. However at the same time the demand for flash memory was exploding which saved the shrink.

But memory also has its limitations, which are human in nature. Moore in memory means you can store more at higher resolution in smaller volumes. But of course there is no use in developing an I-pod that is too small too handle with more music than you can listen to in a lifetime in a higher resolution than the human ear can distinguish.

So unless there will come new applications, Moore's law will loose its main driver in a few years time. But every prediction in this field has the potential of ending up as Gate's famous "64k ought to be enough for everyone" remark.

[radon]

Moores law works IMO because humans when they get their act together can achieve pretty amazing things. If only they acted in the same way on energy.

Nice post. What prevents humans to act in this way on energy, given that they are quite capable of achieving that in the field of chip technology?

But of course there is no use in developing an I-pod that is too small too handle with more music than you can listen to in a lifetime in a higher resolution than the human ear can distinguish.

This is the law of diminishing marginal utility when applied to the consumer-driven technology advancement. I suppose we touched it here.

[smiley]

This is the law of diminishing marginal utility when applied to the consumer-driven technology advancement.

The human body is equipped with some pretty good accelleration sensors.

But we all undergo a accelleration of 0.03 m/s^2 due to the rotation of the earth, yet we do not notice this even if we try.I guess it is the same with technological progress. If this occurs at a pace which is constant and predictable it is perceived as a standstill no matter how fast it goes. Just like you expect everything to become more expensive due to inflation, you expect your next phone to have a few more apps than the last one.

This was my first computer (And I'm not even that old):


And now I can just start up google maps from my computer and look at my favorite stretch of beach
clicky ....or drive down my favorite road. clicky

2 years ago you did not have google streetview, 5 years ago you did not have acces to realtime weather data, 10 years ago you did not have GPS car navigation, 15 years ago internet was a difficult and sluggish creature with little practical use other than to ping your geek friends, 20 years ago you had to go to a bank and write a paper cheque to get some money.

Throw away your expectation and walk the world in amazement.

We're currently in the midst of the information revolution. The only thing, and that was the aim of my remark in the last post, is that our ability to absorb and to use information has not grown. Therefore this revolution will hit a wall sometime. (Judging by my inbox, that point for me is around now ).

Or perhaps we will see a new sort of revolution in information interfacing. But that's the thing with revolutions, you never know when or if they will come. And prediction creates one thousand fools for every hero.

Or perhaps the information revolution will stutter into the next dark ages. Because when progress is the norm, absence of progress becomes a steep cliff.

[radon]

2 years ago you did not have google streetview, 5 years ago you did not have acces to realtime weather data, 10 years ago you did not have GPS car navigation, 15 years ago internet was a difficult and sluggish creature with little practical use other than to ping your geek friends, 20 years ago you had to go to a bank and write a paper cheque to get some money.

But all the vital scientific discoveries that needed for implementation of all these technologies were made quite a long ago, some time at late 60s-early 70s at the latest probably. Some of these technologies worked for quite a while on a limited basis, eg. military applications, such as geo-positioning systems and Internet.

What we have done since then was mainly accumulation of the capital investment and setting up mass production in order to deliver these to the mass consumer. Setting up cameras on every street, cabling, writing up tons of program code (often not ideal), and so on. This all demanded quite a lot of time. But this did not involve any substantial scientific breakthroughs.

Throw away your expectation and walk the world in amazement.

I surely do

We're currently in the midst of the information revolution. The only thing, and that was the aim of my remark in the last post, is that our ability to absorb and to use information has not grown. Therefore this revolution will hit a wall sometime. (Judging by my inbox, that point for me is around now ).

This observation (including your inbox management issue) seems to be playing into hands of the Singularity idea. Indeed, we seem to be actively working on something that we may not even be able to utilize with our limited abilities. This way it looks like we are the blind tools of the technological progress aimed at achieving a certain evolutionary goal, rather than the other way round as we over-confidently think.

Look at the following example illustrating an approach to resource allocation when working on improvement of the performance of computer systems (this example is probably quite well known). The numbers are illustrative of course, not real.

As we know, any program execution by computer involves work of hardware and software components. Suppose that it takes 1 second for a computer to execute a program, with 0.5s being attributable to the hardware delay, and 0.5s to the software delay.

Now, our investment of 100 USD will halve either the hardware delay or software delay, depending on how we spend the money. So let's say we spend these 100 USD to reduce the hardware delay to 0.25s, so that the aggregate delay is now 0.75s.

It does not make sense now to invest the next 100USD in hardware again this round, because if we invest 100USD in hardware we will reduce our aggregate delay to 0.625s, while if we invest them in software, the aggregate delay will be reduced to 0.5s (maths seem to be simple). So we will get (0.625-0.5)/0.75=16.7% greater improvement in performance for the same money, time and resources, if we invest 100USD in software rather than in hardware this time round.

And then the investment iterations go interchangeably between the hardware and software. Simple logic, hopefully.

Now lets extrapolate this example to the technical sciences in general, and to these ends equate the hardware aspect to the IT/high-tech field, and software aspect - to the field of the energy sciences

Question: why do we invest so heavily in IT, where we are already reasonably happy for the time being, while we have this huge energy problem right at our doorsteps? Investing our way, we should only hope that a viable AI model arrives before the humanity goes extinct, in order to preserve evolution and intelligence in the form of Singularity or something similar.

This investment bias appears to be driven by the logic of profit-taking/consumer/free market mechanisms. Under the "investment" I understand not only financial resources, but also human, organisational etc. Arguably, the free market mechanisms will guide us through the bottleneck and will fix the energy problem with the "invisible hand", once the market participants have to confront this problem face to face. But how do we know whether this is true.

My thesis is that the free market logic seems to be faltering here. It appears to be unsuitable when dealing with the problems of the scale that are far beyond the capabilities of a single corporation, and sometimes even a single country.

[PEAKINT]

Not to rain on anyone's party, but we have already peaked technologically. Moore's law died at 28nm

http://electroiq.com/blog/2014/03/moore ... d-at-28nm/

[ohanian]

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-status-of-moores-law-its-complicated

An article from back in 2013

In the mid-1990s, when such chips were the state of the art, 0.35 µm was an accurate measure of the finest features that could be drawn on the chip. This determined dimensions such as the length of the transistor gate, the electrode responsible for switching the device on and off. Because gate length is directly linked to switching speed, you’d have a pretty good sense of the performance boost you’d get by switching from an older-generation chip to a 0.35-µm processor. The term “0.35-µm node” actually meant something.

But around that same time, the link between performance and node name began to break down. In pursuit of ever-higher clock speeds, chipmakers expanded their tool kit. They continued to use lithography to pattern circuit components and wires on the chip, as they always had. But they also began etching away the ends of the transistor gate to make the devices shorter, and thus faster.

After a while, “there was no one design rule that people could point to and say, ‘That defines the node name,’” says Mark Bohr, a senior fellow at Intel. The company’s 0.13-µm chips, which debuted in 2001, had transistor gates that were actually just 70 nm long. Nevertheless, Intel called them 0.13-µm chips because they were the next in line. For want of a better system, the industry more or less stuck to the historical node-naming convention. Although the trend in the measurements of transistors was changing, manufacturers continued to pack the devices closer and closer together, assigning each successive chip generation a number about 70 percent that of the previous one. (A 30 percent reduction in both the x and y dimensions corresponds to a 50 percent reduction in the area occupied by a transistor, and therefore the potential to double transistor density on the chip.)

[ohanian]

http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/16/8976223/intel-q2-2015-earnings-moores-law-skylake-kaby-lake-cannonlake

Tick Tock. Moore's law has stumbled

During a conference call to discuss Intel's latest earnings, CEO Brian Krzanich explained that "the last two technology transitions have signaled that our cadence today is closer to 2.5 years than two." Manufacturing advances haven't progressed at the same pace as before, which is why the company has now seen it necessary to inject the Kaby Lake model into next year and is holding off on Cannonlake, the 10nm, chip, until later into the decade.

[PEAKINT]

Yeah, so much for Star Trek, Omega Point, Singularity, Fusion, Skynet, etc.
Never going to happen. We can't even simulate a worm : http://www.openworm.org/

I've been pissed off at Nvidia. For three generations now they have been stuck at 28nm. Even the Titan X is still at 28nm. For a $1000+ USD (in Q2 2015) graphics card, you'd think one could play 4k gaming at above 30fps? Crysis 3 (old as hell game now) still only does 20fps at 4k on the 28nm Titan X that costs MORE than a PS4 + XboxOne combined. Something not right with that.

Hoping technology will solve our problems and continue to save the day when technology itself has peaked? Good luck with that.

[davep]

Peak Compute

A decrease in the rate of increase is not a peak, it's just a slowdown in the upward curve from exponential.

[PEAKINT]

Peak Compute

A decrease in the rate of increase is not a peak, it's just a slowdown in the upward curve from exponential.

Transistors aren't ever going to get LARGER, we aren't going back to the Abacus...

A slowing down, to me, is a peak. This is not like "running out of oil".

[Plantagenet]

Tick Tock. Moore's law has stumbled

During a conference call to discuss Intel's latest earnings, CEO Brian Krzanich explained that "the last two technology transitions have signaled that our cadence today is closer to 2.5 years than two."

So the doubling of processor power is now taking 2.5 years instead of 2, and you think that means technological progress is at an end?


Sheesh! Give me a break.