Intel Says It Will Move Away From 'Tick-Tock' Development Cycle 124
An anonymous reader writes: In its latest annual report, Intel says that it will be moving away from its decade-old "tick-tock" strategy (PDF) for developing new chips. From the company's 10-K filing, "We expect to lengthen the amount of time we will utilize our 14nm and our next generation 10nm process technologies, further optimizing our products and process technologies while meeting the yearly market cadence for product introductions." Anand Tech's Ian Cutress explains, "Intel's Tick-Tock strategy has been the bedrock of their microprocessor dominance of the last decade. Throughout the tenure, every other year Intel would upgrade their fabrication plants to be able to produce processors with a smaller feature set, improving die area, power consumption, and slight optimizations of the microarchitecture, and in the years between the upgrades would launch a new set of processors based on a wholly new (sometimes paradigm shifting) microarchitecture for large performance upgrades. However, due to the difficulty of implementing a 'tick', the ever decreasing process node size and complexity therein, as reported previously with 14nm and the introduction of Kaby Lake, Intel's latest filing would suggest that 10nm will follow a similar pattern as 14nm by introducing a third stage to the cadence."
R.I.P. Andy Grove (Score:5, Insightful)
My grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf,
So it stood ninety years on the floor;
It was taller by half than the old man himself,
Though it weighed not a pennyweight more.
It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born,
And was always his treasure and pride;
But it stopped short â" never to go again â"
When the old man died.
Ninety years without slumbering
(tick, tock, tick, tock),
His life's seconds numbering,
(tick, tock, tick, tock),
It stopped short â" never to go again â"
When the old man died.
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I was thinking the same thing...
(for those who haven't heard: http://arstechnica.com/informa... [arstechnica.com] )
Maybe the board was waiting for him to be safely on The Other Side before doing this?
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Maybe the board was waiting for him to be safely on The Other Side before doing this?
Then they got it a year too early. Articles were floating around already last year about this, and really why would they? Is it an offence to someone to change a strategy that has been in place for a very very long time because of a changing market, reaching limitations, and wasn't there a law of physics or 2 involved in there somewhere?
I would have liked to believe a man of Andy Grove's genius would have been the first to recognise that doing the same thing over and over again will eventually lead to probl
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Must you haters turn every doggamned story into a homophobic rant about how evil Apple is?
Arythmia model (Score:2)
Then the flatline model
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Re: Arythmia model (Score:2)
Good one!
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Your mom was sucking my cock.
AMD (Score:1)
In other words, AMD finally catches up with Intel and ARM has a big up over Atom because of Intel's lost fab advantage. In good news for us, though, computer chips will get cheaper because it will finally make sense to build more fabs. If we are going to be stuck at 10nm for an indeterminate period of time, the process gets cheaper and it makes sense to build more foundries.
Moore's law, say hello to the law of economics (Score:5, Insightful)
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I also wonder what they call paradigm shifting micro-architectures. Basically, apart from the PIV/Netbu(r)st series, all Intel processors are descendants of the Pentium-Pro, their first OOO processor. The changes have been in the area of completely different FPU units (good riddance for the x87 stack), switching to 64 bit (you have to thank AMD for that), and a few other improvements. But putting the memory controller or the GPU on the chip, using faster/wider I/O busses, or multiplying the number of core
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New instructions don't change the fundamental flow of data inside the processor. In the PPro presentation, they said that the FPU needed 86 bit wide busses (80 bits data + status) and that this was " a lot of bits". Now they have AVX256 and 512 is right around the corner. Using parallelism to implement vector instructions is great for some tasks, but a compiler, for example or an interpreter (Python, Ruby, Perl) still executes mostly basic i386 instructions (or their 64 bit extensions).
Making the instructio
Re: Moore's law, say hello to the law of economics (Score:2)
I'm waiting for the single instruction that renders all my html5, runs all my Javascript and decodes all my video in 80 cycles. My poor old computer grinds to a halt when I open my 35 tabs.
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It is my understanding that the PPro line ended with the Core 1, and the Core 2 was a redesign, and then Sandy Bridge was another redesign.
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And there simply is no competition anymore. Tick-tock was designed to hammer, hammer and keep on hammering against AMD until they were dead, deAD, DEAD! (for those that don't know AMD used to compete against Intel)
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ARM only replacing x86 for servers and consumers (Score:3)
Yeah, ARM can never replace x86. There will never be a day when consumers mostly buy ARM devices rather than x86. Well not until 2014 anyway. The fact is, most CPUs purchased in the last two years were ARM.
In the datacenter, power (and it's associated cooling) is expensive, so we're already starting to see ARM replacing x86 in the datacenter too.
Business desktops still mostly run x86, because they mostly run Windows and Windows is currently x86-centric. Microsoft has already released an ARM vers
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ARM cannot replace x86, will never happen.
And Intel couldn't replace S/360 and POWER and MIPS and SPARC, never happened.
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A better example would be Intel can never replace PDP-11s, VAXs, Data General Novas, Wang 2200, or Prime 50s.
IBM still is making mainframes.
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users who used to use S/360s are using
Please excuse me while I'm going to shoot myself.
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They are but we still have mainframes but minicomputers with the exception of the IBM System/38,AS400,iSeries have all but become extinct.
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A rumour this week is that Apple were haggling over chip maker Imagination.
So it's more a case of MIPS replacing ARM.
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Nah, Apple wants 'em for their mobile graphics chips, mainly. You might see some MIPS in some gadget down the road if the deal does go down, but I can't see Apple throwing away all the investment it's already made in its A* line of ARM chips.
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true, PowerVR is the main reason.
But I wouldn't expect them to chuck the MIPS architecture in the bin entirely. You'd think they'd at least keep the IP alive and make an effort to port an internal build of iOS/OS X to the architecture for fun. Understandably, productization would be some way away if at all.
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AMD is still around, and I'm sure Intel is keeping them alive because they serve as "competition".
Should AMD disappear, Intel would be in a world of hurt from government regulators (the EU has found Intel to be in violation of anti-monopoly laws). So AMD right now is right where Intel wants them -
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This is true. I meant serious competition vs. competition for anti-trust sake.
Re:Moore's law, say hello to the law of economics (Score:5, Insightful)
You hit the nail on the head. "Good enough" has knocked Moore's Law off the rails. Since there isn't that much demand, other than adding cores for virtualization [1], it isn't surprising that Intel is backing off the gas pedal with CPU development.
There are other things as well to add to a CPU. Disk I/O hasn't kept up with capacity gains, and there is always working on better power management which is something I'm sure Intel's enterprise customers are heavily damanding for PR reasons.
[1]: The ideal would be faster cores, since Microsoft has hopped on the Oracle and Sybase bandwagon and started licensing by core, and not CPU socket, but more cores is better than nothing.
Moore's law is dead; physics killed it (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not picking on you in particular, but I'm seeing a lot of posts implying that Moore's law could keep going but it's too expensive, there's not enough competition to warrant it, etc. The fact is that physics is the nail in the coffin for Moore's law. Making small fab processes is getting more and more difficult because these size scales are super tiny, and the difficulty means that Moore's law simply cannot keep going because we have to develop fundamentally new technology -- not just scaled down current technology.
There's a reason Intel is planning to stop using Silicon at 7 nm (not clear what they'll move to -- maybe indium gallium arsenide), and getting up to production quality with a new material is a huge task that is fundamentally incompatible with Moore's law. (InGaAs is not "new" per se, but InGaAs has never seen real commercial use; it has been confined to research labs.)
There's also a reason that research in classical (not only quantum) computing with superconducting circuits is again being seriously researched by commercial enterprises -- including companies like Northrup Grumman which are not traditionally associated with designing computer chips. (IBM poured a lot of money into superconducting computers in the 1980s but ultimately gave up because Si computing was marching along just fine. I think that IBM is back in the superconducting game too.) Again, getting superconducting circuits up and running is _hard_ and fundamentally incompatible with Moore's law.
Moore's law is intrinsically dead. End of story. Even if/when the non-Si chips get up and running, I don't expect that Moore's law will be revived. 7 nm equates to about 14 silicon atoms. The end of the road is in sight. It's trying to march through quicksand from here on out.
PS. I don't get the "lack of competition" hypothesis for why Intel is slowing down; there are a number of manufacturers matching or closing in on Intel's fab process. E.g. Samsung and Globalfoundries are already at 14 nm. TSMC is at 16 nm. These aren't in direct competition with Intel at the moment, but they will be if Intel ever gets serious about putting their chips in things other than desktops/laptops/servers. Intel isn't stupid; they see these other companies as competitors, and Intel really wants a leg up on them. If Intel could keep up with Moore's law, they would.
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Tick/Tock/Wow, new capacitors repost (Score:3)
It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.
- Gordon Moore, in 2005 [wikipedia.org]
The predictions have been right all along! (Score:2)
Guess what: Moore's law has been failing for several generations of fabs! The divergence from Moore's law has been gradual. No one is saying that progress will suddenly stop, but we've been slowly falling behind the "doubling every two years" schedule for a while now (arguably since at least 2012).
Now, you can argue about why that is. However, the problem is not a lack of effort or funding. I have a bunch of friends who work at Intel, and they're not taking it easy. They're working their asses off but makin
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Three? Try 15... I remember reading thirty years ago how fabs would fail once we reached dust size particles/visible light circuit size. For the first problem we got the humans outside the fab, for the second we moved to x-ray frequencies.
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Intel is at 14nm and working hard to push out 10nm after many setbacks, but not long after that, they're done. Did you not read the whole explanation about why Intel is stopping at 7nm on silicon and/or 5nm with other materials? 7nm is 14 silicon atoms wide. Any smaller, and quantum tunneling becomes such a serious issue, they need new materials. With other materials, they MIGHT be able to go as small as 5nm. That's it, though. Any smaller and you basically either need an optical computer or a quan
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Your overall point may (or may not) be valid but this passage in particular is either incorrect or grossly misleading:
Making small fab processes is getting more and more difficult because these size scales are super tiny, and the difficulty means that Moore's law simply cannot keep going because we have to develop fundamentally new technology -- not just scaled down current technology.
We have had to develop new technology after new technology for decades to keep pace with Moore's Law. This is one of the things that makes Moore's Law so fascinating -- it has already spanned over five orders of magnitude (powers of ten). Take a look at the section on enabling factors and future trends on the Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org]. It is possible we have finally reached the end of Moore's Law
recently, we've just scaled down existing methods (Score:2)
Back in the day, moving from bipolar to MOSFET transistors was a fundamentally new technology, but we haven't done anything like that any time recently. Almost all of the examples on that list are old or speculative. All the chips in recent memory have been silicon MOSFETS made using ultraviolet photolithography. Moving from planar transistors to FinFETs is the closet thing to a new technology, but that really seems like a refinement. Moreover, banking on a fundamentally new technology won't save Moore's la
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I fully agree with you that if we are at the end of Moore's Law then it is because of physical limitations and not economics. As for no preceding tech breakthroughs, Intel's first CTO said [sys-con.com] (in 2008):
I compare Moore's Law to driving down the road on a foggy night, how far can you see? Does the road stop after 100 metres? How far can you go?
[...] That's what it's been like with Moore's Law. We thought there were physical limits and [now] we casually speak about going to 10 nanometres. We have work going on different transistor structures. Silicon has become scaffolding for the rest of the periodic table. We're putting these other structures into the materials. We see no end in sight and we've had 10 years of visibility for the last 30 years.
I think it is quite possible he is wrong about Moore's Law extending out to 2028 but I find it very hard to believe he is wrong about the history of Moore's Law leading up to 2008. He was in a position to see the tech breakthroughs first-hand. I don't see why he would lie about it.
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Moore's Law isn't completely dead, it's just metamorphosing into a new form.
If Intel is moving into spintronics (as rumor suggests), then next-generation chips should use millions of times less power (like, run your CPU for a month on a AAA).
If so, it becomes possible to start stacking CPU layers like memory/flash is today. Imagine a next-generation Moore's law stating the number of transistors in a 3D stack doubling every X months.
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Disk I/O speed and bandwidth has been growing by leaps and bounds in the last three years due SSDs. SSDs have made huge improvements in computer performance lately, so much so that if you were to take even a four year old computer and put an SSD into it it would figuratively take off like a rocket. That just goes to show you, if you can't get the data and instructions to the CPU fast enough you're going to be staring a screen wondering why your ap
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Actually it's just Moore's law breaking down, the difficulty is in producing smaller transistors, the technology can't keep up. We know Intel had to delay the 14nm launch because of bad yields, now on 10nm it's probably a lot worse. And to go beyond that you need extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) which is still heavily in the R&D phase. I'm guessing that what Intel really knows at this point is that with a lot of tweaking they can probably do 10nm with acceptable yields using mostly known technology
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Digital computers are reaching the end (Score:4, Interesting)
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Your comment is bad and you should feel bad for making it
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This will make a LOT of people here mad, but the exponential growth computational power of digital computers is ending. We can no longer count of the computers of tomorrow to be significantly faster or have more memory than today. If you have been following the industry closely you can already see start to happen 10 years ago. So we can forget about projections that used the argument of exponential growth creating the "Singularity" or "AI". There just simply won't be enough processor power available with classical digital computers. The computer you use 10 years from now will look and perform a lot like the one you have today.
Heck, the computer I use 10 years from now might very well be the same computer that I'm using today.
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In my experiance ram is a big issue with older systems, especially laptops. I have a mid 2007 macbook (so about 8 and a half years old ) that mostly runs linux and I find myself often struggling for ram. I put 4GB of ram in it recently but linux only sees 3GB, presumablly due to some combination of firmware and chipset limitations. It's very easy to bring the machine to the point of grinding swap (running a 64-bit browser probablly doesn't help as it means the browser can keep chewing up memory rather than
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If it uses some variant of the Intel 945 chipset, which was pretty common back then, then 3GB is the maximum amount of ram it will be able to use.
My almost 10 year old laptop is still mostly fine with the modern web. Though I've maxed it out with 3GB, SSD, and it sports a Core 2 Duo as opposed to a Core/Pentium M and it's got a Mobile Radeon for graphics. It's still more powerful than most tablets (not tablet PCs). It's usually not Javascript but shitty Flash sites that cause the most problem. Part of i
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What you are forgetting is that to keep processor fabs paid for they keep shrinking everything else. While CPUs are 14nm most gpus are not. Ram is not.
In time expect to see ram, gpus, and the other components shrink as well. In 10 years you will buy a computer where all transistors inside it are at 14nm or less and it is Using a fraction of the power.
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Memory almost certainly is at 14nm, if not smaller (they're usually a half-node ahead).
Memory is the most transistor-dense device you could make - of the billi
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At that same conference, my colleague talked to someone working in Xpoint R&D who told him, "If you need a solid-state drive right now, buy the cheapest Samsung model you can get by with, because in the next two years we're going to blow the competition completely away."
Oddly enough, I was at a conference last week where we had a keynote by HP. He was saying pretty much the same thing about memristors. He held up a roughtly credit card sized model that would apparently hold 1.5PB of data. It all sounds cool, but I'll believe it when I see it. These "just around the corner" technologies sometimes take a lot longer than expected to reach market.
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Even more oddly enough, I actually did some consulting with HP back in 2001 concerning their prototype memristor chips. They were h
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They've been developing memristor technology more than 15 years, so hopefully they've finally licked the problems.
Doesn't sound like it. Their world-changing God device known as The Machine is supposed to be based entirely on non-volatile memristor storage. But the first demo units are going to ship based on DRAM.
The HP mouthpiece's excuse? "DRAM essentially is non-volatile as long as the power doesn't go out."
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I heard the same thing nearly two years ago in the form "we are going to produce a 10TB 2.5" drive this year that will kill flash based devices".
I was skeptical then, because I could see someone making the device, I just couldn't see them making it for a price where all the flash vendors up and gave up.
As no one has actually seen a xpoint device, I suspect its still a couple years out for high end applications. Once intel/micron/etc milk that market for a couple years you might see one for your PC, maybe...
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We can no longer count of the computers of tomorrow to be significantly faster or have more memory than today.
Sure we can. We just can't count on them being in the same identical form factor. I fully expect the computer I use 10 years from now to have 4x the RAM, and 4x the number of processing cores. There's still plenty of space in my case for it. I don't expect my laptop to achieve the same thing.
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Sorry, but that's simply not true. Look at the case of Nvidia they had hoped for 16nm for Maxwell (their Kepler successor), but it simply wasn't ready on time. So, they redesigned it and made it more efficient and faster, and that was despite it being on the same 28nm process as Kepler.
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They already confirmed they were screwing us by making future processors lower power rather than faster. They're shoving their green agenda down our throats.
Oh yes, how dare they focus on things that effect users, like how long the battery in their laptop lasts, or their electric bills. The majority of users aren't seeing issues with CPU speed, so it is becoming less of a focus then other factors. Heaven forbid they focus on the consumer's needs.
Re: Digital computers are reaching the end (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yes, how dare they focus on things that effect users, like how long the battery in their laptop lasts, or their electric bills. The majority of users aren't seeing issues with CPU speed, so it is becoming less of a focus then other factors. Heaven forbid they focus on the consumer's needs.
If they could keep whipping the "faster, faster, faster" horse, they would. When the primary advantage of a new computer over an old one is that it takes less power and generates less heat, people don't see much pressure to upgrade. The old one still works just fine, even if the cost of operation is higher. This is not to say that pushing "smaller, cooler, quieter" is a bad thing for the world at large. It's obviously good. But it's not as good for Intel as pushing speed at all costs used to be. Therefore the conclusion has to be that they're doing it this way because as successful as the old way was for them, they can't make it work any longer.
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Absolutely - and I'm more then okay with pushing different aspects of advancement - much like when cars started selling on fuel efficiency without losing power. And, from a profit standpoint, Intel knows that they can't market on faster for too much longer, so they found a new exciting point that they can make big strides with. And it is a small point for some people, but there is a measurable difference in the power bill replacing my Quad G5, Core 2 Quads and Phenoms with i5s (I run BOINC all winter long
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We still have async CPUs.
And improved languages that will allow us to use CPU packages with larger numbers of smaller cores (this could actually work well with asynchronous designs, which seem to be easier for smaller units, see GreenArrays for example). And HSA-like architectures with specialized units for certain tasks, perhaps including FPGA-like computations in the same address space as CPU tasks (and definitely including GPU units in the same address space). Or even neural processing accelerators.
Most people wouldn't need the power anyway (Score:3)
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Should have mentioned diminishing returns (Score:3)
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Single-thread performance is stuck (Score:2)
Tick-Tock-Tock (Score:1)
Re:Tick-Tock-Tock (Score:4, Funny)
That's how Intel will waltz into the next decade.
Not even close to fast enough (Score:2)
Rockstar engineers (Score:2)
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Moving to a three stage process? (Score:5, Funny)
I vote that we call it "Boom Shaka Laka"!
Intel not really ahead on 14nm (Score:1)
The article says: " Intel introduced 14nm back in August 2014, and has since released parts upwards of 400mm2, whereas Samsung 14nm / TSMC 16nm had to wait until the launch of the iPhone to see 100mm2 parts on the shelves"
This is not really a fair statement, as Intel's 14nm process began with very poor yields, while TSMC began from the startoff with very good yields. It was only mid - 2015 that Intel fixed their yield problems.
Translation (Score:2)
Of course they've already been doing this all along. As we rapidly approach the size of a molecule the new frontier will just be power consumption.
It's like hard drive density (Score:1)
Bedrock? (Score:3)
Oh, tick-tock was the bedrock of Intel's success? Silly me, I thought it was more about monopoly control and cutting off AMD's air supply.
AMD (Score:2)
Intel and "Tick-Tock" basically ground AMD into dust. With AMD unable to keep up R&D development, they are no longer really competitive in many of the CPU segments. Meaning that Intel doesn't need to bother anymore (or at least for awhile), as they are really only competing against themselves. Not only are most of Intel CPU offerings "good enough" they are also "better than anything else" so why bother...
water and phase change cooling finally make sense (Score:2)
As CPUs slow to a crawl and soon come screeching to a...pause I'm thinking that water cooling and phase change cooling is going to get a boost. People can finally justify spending money--real money on sophisticated cooling systems. I already have a high end water cooling setup that I haven't used for years, but I've never seriously considered making the jump to phase change..until now.
a new golden age of assembly language programming (Score:2)
Time for programmers to once again enthusiastically embrace assembly language. The age of depending on ever faster hardware as an excuse for fast/lazy/elegant programming is about to end.