Opportunities From the Twilight of Moore's Law 148
Posted
by
timothy
from the finest-corinthian-leather dept.
from the finest-corinthian-leather dept.
saccade.com writes "Andrew 'bunnie' Huang just posted an excellent essay, Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come. He shows how the gradually slowing pace of semiconductor density actually may create many new opportunities for smaller scale innovators and entrepreneurs. It's based on a talk presented at the 2011 Open Hardware Summit. Are we entering an age of heirloom laptops and artisan engineering?"
Re:Definitely slowed ... (Score:4, Informative)
A 3GHz i7 is a _lot_ faster than a 3GHz P4. Have you tried actually comparing them?
Heck, a 2GHz Core 2 Duo core was about comparable in raw speed to a 3.6GHz P4 core last I measured. And an i7 is a lot faster than a Core 2 Duo.
More to the point, Moore's law is about transistor count, not clock speed. Transistor count continues to increase just fine; scaling clock speed just got hard because of power issues and such.