Computing Speed Software Progress
It appears that software has been improving faster than hardware.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-beats-moores-law/
But the White House advisory report cited research, including a study of progress over a 15-year span
on a benchmark production-planning task. Over that time, the speed of completing the calculations
improved by a factor of 43 million. Of the total, a factor of roughly 1,000 was attributable to faster
processor speeds, according to the research by Martin Grotschel, a German scientist and
mathematician. Yet a factor of 43,000 was due to improvements in the efficiency of software algorithms.
The rate of change in hardware captured by Moore’s Law, experts agree, is an extraordinary
achievement. “But the ingenuity that computer scientists have put into algorithms have yielded
performance improvements that make even the exponential gains of Moore’s Law look trivial,” said
Edward Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington.
The rapid pace of software progress, Mr. Lazowska added, is harder to measure in algorithms
performing nonnumerical tasks. But he points to the progress of recent years in artificial intelligence
fields like language understanding, speech recognition and computer vision as evidence that the story
of the algorithm’s ascent holds true well beyond more easily quantified benchmark tests.
What explains the extraordinary pace of software improvement? The answers are doubtless many and
far more complex than I’m going to be able (or capable) of addressing here. But I’d suggest two thoughts
as high-level explanations.
First, software’s perceived weakness is a strength. It can be messy and chaotic, because it is pure
abstraction — a building material without material constraints. That messy, chaotic structure allows more
point of entry for innovation.
Second, my first point may be true, but you don’t get hyper-speed innovation in software without plenty
of rapid improvement in the underlying hardware as well. There is a lot to the notion of the yin and yang
of computing, software and hardware inextricably linked — even if the old saw misstates the relationship
between the two.
Next
It appears that software has been improving faster than hardware.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-beats-moores-law/
But the White House advisory report cited research, including a study of progress over a 15-year span
on a benchmark production-planning task. Over that time, the speed of completing the calculations
improved by a factor of 43 million. Of the total, a factor of roughly 1,000 was attributable to faster
processor speeds, according to the research by Martin Grotschel, a German scientist and
mathematician. Yet a factor of 43,000 was due to improvements in the efficiency of software algorithms.
The rate of change in hardware captured by Moore’s Law, experts agree, is an extraordinary
achievement. “But the ingenuity that computer scientists have put into algorithms have yielded
performance improvements that make even the exponential gains of Moore’s Law look trivial,” said
Edward Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington.
The rapid pace of software progress, Mr. Lazowska added, is harder to measure in algorithms
performing nonnumerical tasks. But he points to the progress of recent years in artificial intelligence
fields like language understanding, speech recognition and computer vision as evidence that the story
of the algorithm’s ascent holds true well beyond more easily quantified benchmark tests.
What explains the extraordinary pace of software improvement? The answers are doubtless many and
far more complex than I’m going to be able (or capable) of addressing here. But I’d suggest two thoughts
as high-level explanations.
First, software’s perceived weakness is a strength. It can be messy and chaotic, because it is pure
abstraction — a building material without material constraints. That messy, chaotic structure allows more
point of entry for innovation.
Second, my first point may be true, but you don’t get hyper-speed innovation in software without plenty
of rapid improvement in the underlying hardware as well. There is a lot to the notion of the yin and yang
of computing, software and hardware inextricably linked — even if the old saw misstates the relationship
between the two.
Next
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