> I, for one, welcome the end of our Moore's Law overlords.
I think if you fully understood the implications of this, you wouldn't be so sanguine.
We're already seeing the effects of a stalling out of process improvements.
Starting a couple years ago, there were articles by enthusiast PC builders who were buying used Xeon processors on eBay, and building new gaming PCs around them, with comparable performance to the i7's available at the time. Just to put some round numbers on that, you had people spending $100 or so on a used CPU (none of that money goes directly to Intel) vs. spending nearly $1000 on a brand new i7.
You can find other instances where a company is competing with their own older, used products... it isn't fun for the company in question.
What's going to happen to Intel's stock price when that sort of thing becomes more common? The price of their stock (and all other tech companies) is based on future value, rather than other companies that pay dividends but otherwise aren't expected to expand significantly.
If investors come to accept the fact that Intel can't really make a chip next year (that will drive hardware and software sales for the entire PC industry), better than last year's chip, their stock will crash. As will all the others in the tech industry.
New hardware (with more capabilities at a reasonable price) drives new software / new applications. If next year's phone isn't better than last year's phone (assuming you can replace the battery that is losing capacity), that will kill valuations in the mobile segment.
Some tech like stacking higher in 3-D on the chip will help applications like NAND Flash storage that aren't heat-dissipation limited. But even there the cost per bit stored will won't be going down at nearly the rate like we're used to seeing.
A tech crash across the board will tank the entire world economy as well, because much of the productivity improvements are based on computer technology.
This is a massive, massive upheaval we're looking at. Unless we switch to new technology that can keep the productivity party going for a while...
I think if you fully understood the implications of this, you wouldn't be so sanguine.
We're already seeing the effects of a stalling out of process improvements.
Starting a couple years ago, there were articles by enthusiast PC builders who were buying used Xeon processors on eBay, and building new gaming PCs around them, with comparable performance to the i7's available at the time. Just to put some round numbers on that, you had people spending $100 or so on a used CPU (none of that money goes directly to Intel) vs. spending nearly $1000 on a brand new i7.
You can find other instances where a company is competing with their own older, used products... it isn't fun for the company in question.
What's going to happen to Intel's stock price when that sort of thing becomes more common? The price of their stock (and all other tech companies) is based on future value, rather than other companies that pay dividends but otherwise aren't expected to expand significantly.
If investors come to accept the fact that Intel can't really make a chip next year (that will drive hardware and software sales for the entire PC industry), better than last year's chip, their stock will crash. As will all the others in the tech industry.
New hardware (with more capabilities at a reasonable price) drives new software / new applications. If next year's phone isn't better than last year's phone (assuming you can replace the battery that is losing capacity), that will kill valuations in the mobile segment.
Some tech like stacking higher in 3-D on the chip will help applications like NAND Flash storage that aren't heat-dissipation limited. But even there the cost per bit stored will won't be going down at nearly the rate like we're used to seeing.
A tech crash across the board will tank the entire world economy as well, because much of the productivity improvements are based on computer technology.
This is a massive, massive upheaval we're looking at. Unless we switch to new technology that can keep the productivity party going for a while...