More on Moore’s Law

It is very popular among economists to bring up the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Notably when assessing the challenge of China and India, to the old world economies of Europe and the United States.

In case you have forgotten.

The Red Queen is Regent of a “Fast” country.

In the book the queen is somewhat puzzled by Alice’s “Slow sort of country“.

The Red Queen tell Alice “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” .

Based on this the Call to arms we hear from economists usually goes something like this:

The western world needs to pull up its collective socks, fix its educational system, think long term and reallocate its resources into less frivolous, less instant gratification endeavors. We must stop dilly-dallying and act like a grown up if we want to preserve our privileged position in the world.

This is not true, we are in great shape.

As a society we have climbed the hill and we can now pretty much coast for the duration.

Few economists and fewer politicians have realized it, but we have entered a new economic phase. Now the current structure of the economy combined with Moore’s law is giving the economy such a tail wind that a substantial yearly growth in the standard of living is not only secure but accelerating almost regardless of what we do, bar nuclear doomsday.

Let me explain.

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This article argues that it’s preferable to measure a microprocessors performance in relative terms. Relative to the highest industry performer at any given point because the requirement for increased computing power is predominately driven by external factors. Moore’s law in its broader sense can then be restated as follows: Any specific speed grade processor decays at constant rate relative to the industry, and the half-life of any fixed computing solution is about 18 month.

This re-framing makes it possible to calculate a processors average relative performance over time and to optimize the upgrade decisions relative to that metric. The optimization process is further constrained by selected values for minimum acceptable performance.

The article concludes that based on current processor price performance ratio an annual upgrade cycle with a processor selected from the lower end of the industry offering is vastly superior to the more traditional procurement heuristics.

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A friend asked me what size disk drive to buy.  Is there an optimal size?

It turns out the answer is yes and the optimal size is e = 2.72.  The base of the natural logarithm  times the size of the drive you have now.  Isn’t this marvelous?

Here is why.

Unless you have very special needs you don’t need to worry about RPM, cache size  and the like when you buy a disk drive.  The reason is that, at any given time, the performance of the disk drives available in the market is within a very narrow band.

This is because at the less performant end you can not substitute slowness for sufficient cost savings. It has been tried a few times but with little success. At the high performance end the component cost rises dramatically* and the cost of drives accordingly. This leaves high performance drives to a small special requirement niches. The trend toward RAID and JBOD for even big storage farms like Google and Amazon result in the disk market being very homogeneous performance wise.

This leaves the size of your new disk as the only real decision parameter. Furthermore Cost per GB is almost constant over the range of the sizes. If you think otherwise look at Pricewatch.com and check yourselves.

So what is a good replacement strategy?
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Wayne Gretzky famously said he never skated to where the puck was, but always to where it was going to be.
This adage has been part of the design philosophy for start-ups for years and increasingly it is being incorporated into the design philosophy of product development of major corporations. Even as product design and life cycles continue to shorten the inexorable march of Moore’s law makes it imperative to plan your response to a world as it will look in one or two years time. Not to the world we see today.

If companies can do this why is the present educational system incapable of doing same?
One reason is of cause the risk of being wrong. If you dig deeper into this aspect I think you will find that the argument is fallacious. It hinges on the assumption that there is a close coupling between what is being taught and what will eventually be needed by the graduates later. This connection is so far off base it is almost risible.

I am not going to expand on this here but since the people reading this are very likely to be graduates themselves, just cast your mind back and compare what concrete knowledge you had at graduation versus what you eventually got to use. (Problem solving methodologies are excluded)

Second the ones that are carrying the real risk is not the ones that is being protected by this attitude. The students are the concrete risk holders but the schools “reputation” is the real reason for the conservatism displayed.

I am an MBA graduate student at ESC Lille and one thing I do know is that any job I get will entail collaboration across geography and time. So how does my school address the need for advanced collaboration learning? By assigning team work with 2-3 of fellow class mates, to be done within a few days and with the lecture schedule adjusted accordingly. Duh!

This is not where the puck is going to be, this is hardly where the puck is now.

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