D5 - Moore's Law and More

Moore's Law

Prediction that transistors per chip double roughly every 2 years, making computing cheaper and faster.

Outcome of Moore’s Law

Exponential growth in chip performance for decades.

Moore’s Law slowing

Physical limits mean clock speeds aren’t increasing; single-thread performance has plateaued.

Parallel performance

Gains now come mostly from multi-core and parallel computing.

AI/ML growth rate

AI performance doubles roughly every 6 months, far faster than Moore’s Law.

AI training cost drop

AI model training went from $1,000 to $7.43 (2017–2020).

Waves of computing

Mainframes → Minicomputers → PCs → Internet → Smartphones → Pervasive computing (IoT).

Pervasive computing

Future devices powered by cloud “remote brains” like smart speakers and autonomous cars.

Cloud computing role

Offloads heavy compute to the cloud, giving devices more power.

Cloud downside

Latency delays from sending data to cloud and back.

Quantum computing

Highly experimental; hyped but not replacing classical computing soon.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Full hardware cost including maintenance, energy, staffing, upgrades, training, and disposal.

Hardware trend: go small

Mobile devices, wearables, and BYOD; increases flexibility but adds security risk.

Hardware trend: go big

Data centers and mainframes for massive compute workloads.

Solar-powered data center

Example of “go green” hardware for sustainability.

High-performance computing (HPC)

Uses supercomputers or many processors working together for large problems.

Grid computing

Links many distributed machines to act like one big supercomputer.

Cluster computing

Group of linked servers functioning as a unified system.

SaaS

Software accessed through a browser; provider handles everything.

PaaS

Cloud tools and platforms developers use to build apps.

IaaS

Renting cloud servers, storage, and networking instead of owning hardware.

Cloud tradeoff

Less control and customization but lower cost and fewer management responsibilities.