Progress in computer technology over the past four
decades has been spectacular, driven byMoore's Lawwhich, though initially an
observation, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a boardroom
planning tool.
Although Intel co-founder
Gordon
Moore expressed his vision of progress simply in terms of the
number of transistors that could be manufactured economically on an
integrated circuit, the means of achieving this progress was based
principally on shrinking transistor dimensions, and with that came
collateral gains in performance, power-efficiency and cost.
The semiconductor industry appears to be confident in its
ability to continue to shrink transistors, at least for another
decade or so, but the game is already changing. We can no longer
assume that smaller circuits will go faster, or be more
power-efficient.
As we approach atomic limits, device variability is beginning to
hurt, and design costs are going through the roof. This is
impacting the economics of design in ways that will affect the
entire computing and communications industries.
For example, on the desktop there is a trend away from
high-speed uni-processors towards
multicore processors, despite the fact that general-purpose
parallel
programming remains one of the great unsolved problems of
computer science.
If computers are to benefit from future advances in technology,
there will be major challenges ahead, involving understanding how
to build reliable systems on increasingly unreliable technology and
how to exploit parallelism more effectively, not only to improve
performance, but to mask the consequences of component failure.
Biological systems demonstrate many of the properties the
industry would like to incorporate into its own engineered
technology, so perhaps that suggests a possible source of ideas
that information technologists could seek to incorporate into
future computation systems.
With this in mind, the Computer Journal is presenting a lecture
entitled
"The
Future of Computer Technology and its Implications for the Computer
Industry" on 12 February at the BCS offices in London.
The lecture will be given by
Steve
Furber, ICL professor of computer engineering at the University
of Manchester.