My Slow Neighbors

About six weeks ago I moved into a new neighborhood. It’s a little removed from the city, very quiet, and has great views of the mountains. On the small gravel side road I live on now there are perhaps 10 houses total.

The house has a wonderful front porch facing north and west with amazing views of the mountains which are just a few miles away. I’ve been eating out there, reading, sitting, writing – enjoying being outside. With so many neighbors, when a car rolls by, it’s pretty obvious. I’ve noticed one of my neighbors in particular. They drive an older, red, Chevy or Pontiac sedan. The car itself stands out a bit, but what’s more evident is the speed. They seem to crawl down the road, you can almost hear each rock as the tires roll over the gravel roadway. I’ve seen this car perhaps a dozen times and have always been surprised. Most people are in such a rush, it’s unusual to see someone driving so slowly.

I’ve always tried to keep a reasonable speed in neighborhoods in side streets, after all I want to respect the people that live there, and hope that if they ever drive down my street they might show the same respect. So it is here in my own neighborhood, I’ve kept my speed on the gravel road pretty slow. Lately though, I’ve noticed my speed getting slower, almost mimicking my neighbors. For the few times it was unconscious and I didn’t realize I was doing it, yet something stuck with me.

I’m now a regular creeper on my road. It’s become a ritual of sorts. Leaving home, it’s a transition from the quiet, settled space of home to the rest of the world. Coming home, I turn off the main road and immediately slow down and begin the passage back from the fullness of life to the peace of being home. My street isn’t long, perhaps a couple hundred meters from the main road to my driveway and yet those twenty or thirty seconds have an unusual meaning and depth to them. A slowing down, noticing my neighborhood, feeling my soul settle, and then reaching home.

So this evening as I write from my porch in the evening air, I want to thank my neighbors in the red car.

Moore's Law

Moore’s Law is a prediction that the number of transistors on a computer processor within the same area would double every 18-24 months. This statement was made by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel Corporation, in 1965 after being asked to give a prediction of what the next 10 years of semiconductor development would look like.

Astonishingly, Moore’s Law has been fairly accurate for the past 45 years since Moore put forth his prediction. The accuracy can even be extended backward in time from 1965 to 1946 when ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer was created.

In general this also means there has been a decreasing cost per unit (or increase performance per unit).

Here’s a short timeline of Intel chips for Personal Computers to illustrate the effect in just the past 25 years.

-          1984 – 8086 chip had 29,000 transistors. A complete IBM PC was about $3000 (or $7000 today)

-          1992 – 386 chip had 275,000 transistors

-          2002 – Itanium 2 chip had 220,000,000 transistors

-          2011 –6-core i7 chip has 2,270,000,000 transistors. A complete PC today about $2000.

It would take 80,000 8086 chips from 1984 to match the power of just 1 modern i7 chip! Or it would cost probably in excess of $50,000,000 for a computer in 1984 with the equivalent power of a 2011 i7 personal computer.

This is just a common personal computer, not even a server or a super-computer which are still thousands of times more powerful – and which before long will be sitting on a desk, or in a phone even.

Transistors are not the technology following an exponential growth curve

-          Graphics processing (pixels) which also affects TVs

-          Storage, both hard drives and RAM

o   In 1984 512 kilobytes of memory was a lot for a PC. Today  25 years later, 8 gigabytes is common, or 16,000 times more memory.

o   In 1984 10 megabytes was a good sized hard for a PC. Today 25 years later, 500 Gigabytes is common, or 50,000 times more hard drive storage.

-          Network capacity and throughput

o   In 1984 a 1200 bits/second modem was common. Today a home internet connection is 5 Megabits/second (625,000 bytes/second) or 4000 times faster. And beyond the home those networks are even faster.

-          Digital cameras

o   The first 1 MegaPixel cameras were introduced around 1998. Today there are cameras with 20 MegaPixels, or 20 times as many pixels.

-          Solar power generation

-          Information generation – the amount of information available on the internet – music, video, photos, blogs, newspapers, research, etc.

The nature of the physical world as it’s currently understood it does seem to put a limit on Moore’s Law. At the very least the limit of 1 atom will be reached. 1 atom however is not a singular entity, but composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons with varying energies, spins, and fields. It’s not inconceivable to have computing and storage capacities at a subatomic level. Nevertheless, it’s still expected that Moore’s Law will continue to be accurate for another 20 years. Which means another 1000-fold increase in power!

With this kind of exponential growth, in 2005 there was 1 million times more computing power in a similar area than in 1965. In less than 15 years from now in 2025, there will be 1 billion times more computer power in a similar are than in 1965!

I imagine these kinds of numbers are hard to understand and grasp. Why? Mostly it’s invisible and it’s so ubiquitous. These rapid growth cycles mean the new stuff is integrated into daily life very quickly. It’s also hard to find any comparisons since there isn’t much that much with the same speed – building/housing, transportation (cars and planes), books, energy development. These are all no doubt affected by the increases in computing power, but they continue to move in a much longer lifecycle.

As technology continues to move forward so quickly, I think it’s worthwhile to attempt to understand the trends and where they might lead. Moore’s Law is one of the ways to do that.