Week 2 Readings - Moore's Law Wikipedia Article

I came away from this article with impressions that I will retain even as the specifics of the facts will eventually fade. Some of the impressions were in fact confirmations of ideas that I already know. CPU's continue to become more powerful and less expensive to us as consumers, even though their production costs may increase. The question that comes to mind is, why do companies continue to match their development and production efforts to Moore's Law?

Clearly, their efforts have yielded consumer benefits--first cell phones were 4 to 10 times the size of today's models and cost much more. Our current camcorder is a lot easier to use than the big one we can no longer get batteries for, and carrying around 25 cds of songs on my MP3 player is a lot easier than carrying around the originals. I know the companies are happier with their profit than my satisfaction, but we both win.

However, the article implies that within the development community, following the law for the law's sake is also a development goal. Is there a limit to how small microcircuits can become? It is an interesting question; but I'm not sure spending $3,000,000 just to find out is a good enough reason, particularly when other components may not be able to take advantage of the available processing power. I think many of us have experienced this phenomenon when our PC has the latest processor but our other components can't take advantage of it, or our software applications are intensive enough that any advantage quickly dissipates.

I think we do continue to expect faster and cheaper computing, in all of our devices, so as consumers, we contribute to the effort to test Moore's Law's limits. However, today's incredible must-have technology all too quickly becomes a disappointment these days. This is a real dilemma for today's libraries, whether or not the librarian knows what Moore's Law is.