Moore’s Law: Obituaries are premature
Moore’s “Law” – which predicts a halving of the cost per transistor every 18 months – has remained remarkably accurate over the last four decades, yet there are those who claim that it is about to come to an end.
Proclaiming the demise of Moore’s Law is nothing new – it has been a perennial pastime of pundits. But they were wrong before, and they’re still wrong.
To write an obituary for Moore’s Law either indicates a lack of understanding of Gordon Moore’s original claims or a needlessly narrow view of its implications. A broader interpretation – predicting an exponential reduction in the cost of computing over time – is as robust as ever and shows no signs of abating. (more…)
2 comments May 12, 2008
Giving voice to a billion things
We started this journey over ten years ago at the MIT Media Lab, when a bunch of us started marrying microcontrollers with short-range radios and inventing networking algorithms that allowed them to talk to each other.
We built stuffed penguins that recognized where they were and would talk to you about it. We built meshed wireless sensor networks for measuring microclimatology on Hawaiian islands. We built colorful glowing orbs that communicated with their neighbors and all changed colors when any one was touched. We even built a digital whoopee cushion into the chair of the department head that caused his computer to do “interesting” things when he sat down.
These were all early examples of Device Networking — giving everyday, autonomous objects (toy penguins, weather stations, orbs, Steelcase chairs) a link to each other and a voice on the internet. And though some people thought we were a little crazy to talk about networking streetlamps and making wireless light switches, our reasoning was clear: microcontrollers would continue to become more powerful and cheaper, and the imperative to network these small islands of computation would become only stronger.
Today, our reasoning appears to have been exactly on target. There has been a proliferation of wireless protocols designed to link “things” rather than high-speed computers, and you can even purchase processors with on-board radio links that run these protocols from Digikey, the mecca of all things electronic.
We’re here to “give voice to a billion things”, to foment the ongoing development of Device Networking and to catalyze the growth of the Embedded Internet. Considering that the number of microcontrollers manufactured each year exceeds the world human population, it’s a good place to be.
Welcome.
Note: The author gratefully acknowledges Elizabeth Corcoran of Forbes Magazine for the title of this blog entry, appropriated without permission from http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/0906/144d.html.
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4 comments May 5, 2008
