The Forbe’s article ‘Life after Moore’s  Law’ suggests that the doubling of processor power every 18 months is over.

But in a development that’s been largely overlooked, this power scaling has ended. And as a result, the CPU scaling predicted by Moore’s Law is now dead. CPU performance no longer doubles every 18 months. And that poses a grave threat to the many industries that rely on the historic growth in computing performance.

Going forward, the critical need is to build energy-efficient parallel computers, sometimes called throughput computers, in which many processing cores, each optimized for efficiency, not serial speed, work together on the solution of a problem. A fundamental advantage of parallel computers is that they efficiently turn more transistors into more performance. Doubling the number of processors causes many programs to go twice as fast. In contrast, doubling the number of transistors in a serial CPU results in a very modest increase in performance–at a tremendous expense in energy.

I have to admit that I don’t even understand the correlation between processor speed (GHZ) and performance anymore. And if it is dead, that means that coders will have to seriously review how they write their programs because I still find my PC slowing down. One also has to wonder at the impact of web services, which puts the processing power in the cloud (impacting the need for local server or desktop processor speed).

Although I hope it continues, I love to watch computer components continue to tumble down. $84 for a 1.5TB drive is pleasantly mad.

The end of an interesting phenomenon (perhaps).