Less+is+more


 * By Karl S. Kruszelnicki **

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, once gave a lecture called, "There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom". He claimed that if we were ever able to write one piece of information per atom, we could store every bit of information ever generated by the entire human race in something smaller than a grain of sand. We are now heading down that pathway, and it's all thanks to Moore's Law. Gordon Moore is currently the richest man in California. He's worth about $7 billion. In 1969, he and a few friends set up the Intel company. Today, 80% of all the money spent over the whole world on computer chips goes to Intel. But way back in 1965, before Intel, he proclaimed what is now called Moore's Law. Moore's Law basically says that every 18 months, we develop the technology to shrink transistors to half their previous size. In other words, we double the packing density of chips. This would mean that if the computer chip stayed the same size, after 18 months, you could shove twice as many transistors into it. There have been a few minor changes over the last 35 years - the shrinking/halving time has varied between 12 and 24 months - but on average, Gordon Moore was remarkably correct. For the last third-of-a-century-or-so, the number of transistors on a chip has doubled about every 18 months. This is the main reason that today, semiconductors are a $150-billion-a-year industry - they give you very good value for money. Now over the last 20 years just about every known commodity (from the car you drive, to groceries you eat, to the house you live in) has had a massive increase in price. But over that same time, computers have had a massive drop in price. There are two electronic components that benefit from this shrinking - the memory that stores information, and the microprocessor that does the logic or thinking. Back in 1988, your average computer RAM (Random Access Memory) was about one quarter of a MB - today, it's about 128MB (about 500 times bigger). Back then your average microprocessor was ambling at a few MHz, but today they flash by at 500 MHz. But let's go back half-a-century. Back in 1947, the ENIAC was probably the first digital electronic computer. In fact, for 9 years, from 1947 to 1956, it was the most powerful electronic computer on Earth. And if Big Is Beautiful, ENIAC was drop dead gorgeous. It had 19,000 vacuum tubes and 1,500 relays. It weighed 27 tonnes, filled about 460 cubic metres, and could add 5,000 numbers every second. To do all of this it chewed up 170 kilowatts of power - enough to run a small village. Two years later, in 1949, the March edition of Popular Mechanics said that in the distant future computers might have "only 1,500 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tonnes", and still be as powerful as the ENIAC computer. Well, Moore's Law has well and truly taken over. Today we have computers that will fit in the palm of your hand and do millions of calculations every second. And they don't need huge mountains of electricity - they will run quite comfortably on a pair of little AA-batteries for a month or more! One great advantage of Moore's Law over the last 10 years is that it has helped really badly-written software keep on running. Recently, the computer media claimed that when Microsoft Windows 2000 was released, it had some 63,000 known bugs, as well as who-knows how many unknown bugs. Software has been bloating and getting bigger - and while it's been getting bigger, it's also been getting buggier, with more and more bugs in it. We've had progressively worse, and sloppily-written, software programs. But thanks to Moore's Law, we've had these faster machines that have been able to deal with this crummy software, so that it still runs. Moore's Law has given the makers of badly designed software a free ride. Some computer software companies have the saying: "Don't worry how big or bad it is, we'll just throw some faster hardware at it". If we followed Moore's Law up to the year 2050, doubling the number of transistors every 18 months, we would have a very powerful computer indeed. It would have the storage capacity of 200,000 human brains, and a processing speed some 500 million times faster than the current Pentium or Apple G4 computers chips. But are there limits to speed and performance on the hi-tech super-highway? Some computer scientists and engineers claim that we're going to hit a major roadblock in Moore's Law around 2012, and that's what I'll talk about next time.....