10-31-2017, 12:41 PM
Way back in 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicted that computers would get twice as powerful every two years — a prediction which has mostly come true, and is now enshrined as "Moore's Law." However, many, including Moore himself, now believe Moore's Law is screeching to a halt. It's going to mean a huge shift for the technology industry. “To be honest, it's going to be tougher and tougher for people to develop new and exciting products every year,” said Google hardware boss Rich Osterloh, on stage at the company's recent Pixel 2 phone launch event. The iPhone you own today is many millions of times more powerful than NASA's state of the art computers when Moore posited his famous law. But whichever smartphone you own ten years from now may not be that much more powerful than the iPhone X you might be getting in November, if only in terms of processing power. So, yes, change is in the air. It's going to require a new way of thinking about hardware. And, so far, it's Google and Amazon leading the charge, even as this shift stands to hit hardware-centric companies like Apple hardest. Artificial intelligence squeezes out more performance. At the most basic level, the idea is that if processors aren't going to get much faster, then the burden is to make better use of the ones we've got. This is a big piece of why artificial intelligence is suddenly such a popular idea across Silicon Valley — it means that processors are working smarter, not harder, to borrow an old chestnut.