[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4cast #483: Lawless computers

[OPLIN Support]

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.
<http://www.oplin.org/4cast/>
[image: OPLIN 4Cast]

OPLIN 4cast #483: Lawless computers
March 30th, 2016

[image: stop sign] Andy Grove, one of the first leaders of Intel
Corporation, died last week. He is not the only Intel pioneer, however,
whose name has been in the tech media lately. Gordon Moore has also been in
the news, as there have been quite a few articles about Intel's decision to
abandon its pursuit of Moore's Law, named after him. Not a law as much as a
goal, Moore's Law set the expectation that the number of transistors on a
computer chip would double every two years, and achieving this growth has
been the guiding "law" of the computer industry for decades. Now that the
physical limits of Moore's Law are in sight, people are casting around for
new ideas to make computers better - perhaps later than they should have.
Moore's Law worked, and as Andy Grove said, "Success breeds complacency."

   - Intel puts the brakes on Moore's Law
   <https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601102/intel-puts-the-brakes-on-moores-law/>
   (MIT Technology Review | Tom Simonite) "Since the 1970s, Intel has released
   chips that fit twice as many transistors into the same space roughly every
   two years, aiming to follow an exponential curve named after Gordon Moore,
   one of the company's cofounders. That continual shrinking has helped make
   computers more powerful, compact, and energy-efficient. It has helped bring
   us smartphones, powerful Internet services, and breakthroughs in fields
   such as artificial intelligence and genetics. And Moore's Law has become
   shorthand for the idea that anything involving computing gets more capable
   over time."
   - The chips are down for Moore's law
   <http://www.nature.com/news/the-chips-are-down-for-moore-s-law-1.19338>
   (Nature | M. Mitchell Waldrop) "Not for much longer. The doubling has
   already started to falter, thanks to the heat that is unavoidably generated
   when more and more silicon circuitry is jammed into the same small area.
   And some even more fundamental limits loom less than a decade away.
   Top-of-the-line microprocessors currently have circuit features that are
   around 14 nanometres across, smaller than most viruses. But by the early
   2020s, says Paolo Gargini, chair of the road-mapping organization, 'even
   with super-aggressive efforts, we'll get to the 2-3-nanometre limit, where
   features are just 10 atoms across. Is that a device at all?'"
   - After Moore's Law
   <http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-03-12/after-moores-law>
   (Technology Quarterly | The Economist) "In the past the relentless doubling
   and redoubling of computing power meant there was less of an incentive to
   experiment with other sorts of improvement. More radically, some hope to
   redefine the computer itself. One idea is to harness quantum mechanics to
   perform certain calculations much faster than any classical computer could
   ever hope to do. Another is to emulate biological brains, which perform
   impressive feats using very little energy. Yet another is to diffuse
   computer power rather than concentrating it, spreading the ability to
   calculate and communicate across an ever greater range of everyday objects
   in the nascent internet of things."
   - Moore's Law will soon end, but progress doesn't have to
   <http://www.digitaltonto.com/2016/moores-law-will-soon-end-but-progress-doesnt-have-to/>
   (Digital Tonto | Greg Satell) "Still, you wouldn't want either of these
   running your word processor. As [Bernie] Meyerson [IBM's Chief Innovation
   Officer] put it, 'Quite frankly, for general purpose computing all that
   stuff isn't very helpful and we'll never develop it in time to make an
   impact beyond specialized applications over the next 5 or 10 years. For the
   practical future, we need to change our focus from chip performance to how
   systems perform as a whole by pursuing both hardware and software
   strategies.'"

*Articles from Ohio Web Library <http://ohioweblibrary.org>:*

   - How Moore's Law changed-and is still changing-history.
   <http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=102251259>
   (*PC Magazine*, May 2015, p.12-16 | Damon Poeter)
   - The search for a new machine.
   <http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cmh&AN=102049920>
   (*Scientific American*, May 2015, p.58-63 | John Pavlus)
   - Extrapolating from Moore's Law.
   <http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=111924760>
   (*Communications of the ACM*, Jan. 2016, p.33-35 | Michael A. Cusumano
   and David B. Yoffie)

------------------------------
The *OPLIN 4cast* is a weekly compilation of recent headlines, topics, and
trends that could impact public libraries. You can subscribe to it in a
variety of ways, such as:

   - *RSS feed.* You can receive the OPLIN 4cast via RSS feed by
   subscribing to the following URL:
   http://www.oplin.org/4cast/index.php/?feed=rss2.
   - *Live Bookmark.* If you're using the Firefox web browser, you can go
   to the 4cast website (http://www.oplin.org/4cast/) and click on the
   orange "radio wave" icon on the right side of the address bar. In Internet
   Explorer 7, click on the same icon to view or subscribe to the 4cast RSS
   feed.
   - *E-mail.* You can have the OPLIN 4cast delivered via e-mail (a'la
   OPLINlist and OPLINtech) by subscribing to the 4cast mailing list at
   http://mail.oplin.org/mailman/listinfo/OPLIN4cast.

© 2016 Ohio Public Library Information Network
[image: Find us on Slideshare] <http://www.slideshare.net/oplin>  [image:
Find us on Facebook] <http://www.facebook.com/oplin.org>  [image: Find us
on Google+] <https://plus.google.com/107751358238995507967>  [image: Find
us on Twitter] <http://www.twitter.com/oplin>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.oplin.org/pipermail/oplin4cast/attachments/20160330/e8c79c0f/attachment.html>