On March 15, as Moore's law to the end, the progress of computer hardware predictable time will come to an end. What is the future of computing? The economist magazine recently wrote, determine the future of computing will no longer be a simple hardware performance, but three other fields: software, "cloud" and a new computing architecture.

Below is the article main content:

In 1971, the world's fastest cars is up to 280 KPH (174 MPH) ferrari Daytona, Daytona), the world's highest tower is 415 meters (1362 feet) high in New York's twin towers. In November of that year, Intel unveiled its first commercial microprocessor chip "4004", the chip contains 2300 single red blood cell size of micro-transistor.

Since then, the chip has been in accordance with the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (Gordon Moore) prediction of continuous improvement. According to he was known as "Moore's law" rules of thumb, with the decrease of the transistor, can more closely into the silicon wafer, improve performance and reduce costs, processing performance of the chip can promote double about every two years.

Intel modern Skylake processor contains about 1.75 billion half of transistor - can load within a single transistor - performance of the "4004" to "4004" 400000 times. This kind of exponential growth in the physical world is difficult to achieve. If the car since 1971 and skyscrapers can increase at such a speed, it is now the fastest cars speed can reach one over ten of the speed of light, the highest building up to half of the distance between the earth and the moon.

The impact of Moore's law in real life is obvious. At present, there are 3 billion people worldwide have smart phones; The performance of each a smartphone than in the 1980 s has a room the size of the super powerful computer. One of the industry by the digital revolution. Powerful computing performance and can be used in a nuclear test, compared with the real test, by simulation explosion test atomic weapons will come more easily. Moore's law has become a philosophy: silicon valley inside and outside are looking forward to a year of science and technology is better than a year.

However, after 50 years later, Moore's law was near the end. Make transistors more small can no longer guarantee they become cheaper, more rapid. This does not mean that the progress in the field of computing will suddenly stalled, but the nature of its progress is changing. Chip will still be getting better and better, but the speed of increase will slow (Intel, said the chip performance can now only is doubling every 2.5 years.) The future of computing will be beyond simple hardware performance is determined by the three areas of improvement.

The future depends on three areas

The first field is the software. In the past week, Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo straight world go champion lee se-dol three innings. Computer scientists to go especially interested in because it is very complex: may change than particles in the universe. As a result, the game system will not be able to rely on the calculation of Moore's law to provide performance improvements to win. AlphaGo rely on "deep learning" technology, the technology to a certain extent in accordance with the way the human brain works. It has shown that, by the new algorithm can achieve significant performance improvements. Indeed, the slow progress of hardware, will bring the industry a greater incentive to develop more intelligent software.

Calculate the second area of progress is to "cloud" : provide services through Internet data center network. When the computer is independent of the equipment, whether a mainframe or a desktop, their performance is totally depends on the speed of the processor chip. And now, without hardware changes, the computer can also become more powerful. In search of email, calculated the optimal route task, such as they are able to use large cloud computing resources (and flexible). Interconnectedness to further strengthen their functions: today, in terms of smart phones, satellite positioning, motion sensors, wireless payment support functions such as the importance of no less processor performance.

Computing industry and progress of the third sector is a new computing architecture - for specific tasks and optimization of the special chip, even the use of quantum mechanics and deal with the unique technology of multiple data sets. When general microprocessor can promote quickly, to pursue this kind of technology is not needed, but today, the industry in specific to cloud computing, neural network processing, computer vision tasks such as chip design. This type of dedicated hardware will be embedded into the clouds, when they need it calls. It also shows that the end user equipment hardware performance has not ever so important.

Speed isn't everything

In practice, what this will mean? Moore's law is never what the laws of physics, but it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. End it will make science and technology progress speed is not so easy to predict; New improve computing performance bound to hashing technology on the way forward. But with most people is measured by features rather than processing speed their computing devices, consumers may not feel the computing performance of slow progress.

For businesses, the failure of Moore's law will be hide in the shift to cloud computing. There are companies reducing the frequency, upgrade the PC to stop operating their email server. However, this mode depends on fast and reliable network connection. It will strengthen the broadband infrastructure improvement needs: bad enterprise will not benefit the networking condition, because of the improvement of computing will be more and more inside the cloud provider's data center.

For the technology industry itself, the failure of Moore's law to strengthen the already for some big companies (including amazon, Google, Microsoft, alibaba, baidu and tencent) emphasizes the centralization of the logic of cloud computing. They are working to improve the performance of the cloud infrastructure. They are searching for a new start-up technology company: Google acquired in 2014 from the UK Deepmind AlphaGo developers.