Near Future Prognostication

Science Fiction writers are, as a general rule, supposed to have a handle on the future and often this is indeed so. If they come from a computer/high-tech background then this is even more the case. Hence the recent speech by Charlie Stross at LOGIN 2009 is well worth reading and pondering.

The speech is about the future of computing, and particularly gaming, over the next 20 years and it has a number of somewhat controversial predictions. One of which is that Mr Stross predicts that we are approaching the end of Moore’s law with regard to chip power and density. Another, perhaps less controversial point, is that the race for CPU manufacturers and architectures appears to now be at “Game over” with two winners: Intel and ARM. What Mr Stross points out that is frequently missed though is that if one counts raw numbers then ARM is in fact the out and out winner. This is because ARM utterly dominates the modern embedded CPU market and embedded devices are far more numerous than PCs, laptops and servers. ARM’s numerical domination has actually been true for (almost) all of the last decade although in the beginning the major CPU types were venerable 8-bit designs. These days new designs all use ARM cores primarily for power reasons as it is rare than a controller actually needs the memory and CPU power of an 32 bit core.

More interestingly he points out that while processing power may be plateauing network bandwidth still shows plenty of potential for multiple generations of growth. Current bandwidth is in the Gigabit/second range and physics only starts predicting problems when we get in the multiple terabits/second range. Of course some media are probably almost maxed out (copper wiring for example) but wireless and fiber transmissions still have a long way to go before hitting limits.

I won’t descibe much more, really it is better to read the original and the comment thread it inspired.