Fascinating article from Tim Harford on whether Wright's Law or Moore's Law is the determining factor in the prices of new technology. If it's Wright's Law, we could have had a green transition years ago.
No "almost" about it -- any good cell phone in 2024 would seem like pure magic if you sent it back to 1978, even though doing so would disable nearly all of its functions due to the absence of cell service, wifi, and the Internet.
I wrote software on the more advanced Cray 2 in the late 1980s. Its power was literally awe-inspiring. 1/2
I'm at the Intel Innovation conference today in San Jose. I expect a coming-out party for Meteor Lake, Intel's next-gen PC processor arriving later this year. Plus lots of chatter about chipmaking, AI, Xeon, development software. It wouldn't be an Intel event without lots of 300mm wafers. 1/n #Intel#processors#semiconductors#chips
"Moore's Law is alive and well," Gelsinger says (again). Intel is headed toward 1 trillion transistors on a single processor by the end of the decade. Note that Moore's Law is about transistor count on chips, not the cost per transistor, which is now increasing. 6/n #Intel#MooresLaw#processors
The semiconductor industry is perpetually trying to find a way around the next engineering roadblock. Intel thinks it's figured out a doozy: glass substrate technology to package processors.
"Basically, the innovation is done," says tech development leader Ann Kelleher. I was one of 2 journalists to get an early deep dive into the technology at Intel's Chandler, Arizona, fab.
@gruber Oh noes! IMy #iPad Pro never seemed to be slow for anything... This is unexpected. (I probably thought this about my original Fat Mac in 1985.)
Speaking of which, the image is a B&W of the interior of my original Fat Mac (MacIntosh 512K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_512K). Taken with a iPhone 14 Pro Max 1 second exposure.
Enlarge the image and look at the signatures of the original staff that made the MacIntosh a product.
I bought in 1985. While I do most of my writing on the iPad Pro, I wrote my early novels on this machine and thought it would last forever. I wrote my first novel on an Apple ].