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Information Systems:
A Manager’s Guide to Harnessing Technology

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Chapter 5
Moore’s Law: Fast, Cheap Computing and What It Means for the Manager

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Learning Objectives

  • Define Moore’s Law and understand the approximate rate of advancement for other technologies, including magnetic storage (disk drives) and telecommunications (fiber-optic transmission)
  • Understand how the price elasticity associated with faster and cheaper technologies opens new markets, creates new opportunities for firms and society, and can catalyze industry disruption
  • Recognize and define various terms for measuring data capacity

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Learning Objectives

  • Consider the managerial implication of faster and cheaper computing on areas such as strategic planning, inventory, and accounting
  • Describe why Moore’s Law continues to advance, and discuss the physical limitations of this advancement
  • Name and describe various technologies that may extend the life of Moore’s Law

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Learning Objectives

  • Discuss the limitations of each of these approaches
  • Give examples of the business use of supercomputing and grid computing
  • Describe grid computing and discuss how grids transform the economics of supercomputing

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Learning Objectives

  • Understand the characteristics of problems that are and are not well suited for supercomputing and grid computing
  • Understand the magnitude of the environmental issues caused by rapidly obsolete, faster and cheaper computing
  • Explain the limitations of approaches attempting to tackle e-waste

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Learning Objectives

  • Understand the risks firms are exposed to when not fully considering the lifecycle of the products they sell or consume
  • Ask questions that expose concerning ethical issues in a firm or partner’s products and processes, and that help the manager behave more responsibly

Some Definitions

  • Moore’s Law: Chip performance per dollar doubles every eighteen months
  • Microprocessor: The part of the computer that executes the instructions of a computer program
  • Random-access memory (RAM): The fast, chip-based volatile storage in a computing device
  • Volatile memory: Storage (such as RAM chips) that is wiped clean when power is cut off from a device
  • Nonvolatile memory: Storage that retains data even when powered down (such as flash memory, hard disk, or DVD storage)

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Some Definitions

  • Flash memory: Nonvolatile, chip-based storage, often used in mobile phones, cameras, and MP3 players
  • Solid state electronics: Semiconductor-based devices
  • Semiconductors: A substance such as silicon dioxide used inside most computer chips that is capable of enabling as well as inhibiting the flow of electricity
  • Optical fiber line: A high-speed glass or plastic-lined networking cable used in telecommunications

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Figure 5.1 – Advancing Rates of Technology (Silicon, Storage, Telecom)

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Get Out Your Crystal Ball

  • When technology gets cheap, price elasticity kicks in
  • The five waves of computing over the previous five decades:
  • 1960s – Mainframe computers
  • 1970s – Minicomputers
  • 1980s – PCs
  • 1990s – Internet computing
  • Present – Ubiquitous computing

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Ambient Devices and the Fifth Wave

  • Ambient Devices is a “fifth wave” firm that’s embedding computing and communications devices into everyday products to make them more useful and smarter
  • Ambient’s ability to pull off this little miracle is evidence of how quickly new markets, spawned by Moore’s Law, can come into being
  • Ambient has expanded the product line to several low-cost appliances designed to provide information at a glance

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Get Out Your Crystal Ball

  • One of the most agile surfers of this fifth wave is Apple, Inc,
  • A firm with a product line that is now so broad that in January 2007, it dropped the word “Computer” from its name
  • The high-end iPod increased song capacity by forty times in six years while dropping in cost by fifty dollars
  • The change in hard drive prices isn’t directly part of Moore’s Law, the faster and cheaper phenomenon applies to storage
  • Example: Amazon

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Bits and Bytes

  • Computers express data as bits that are either one or zero
  • Eight bits form a byte
  • A kilobyte refers to roughly a thousand bytes, or a thousand characters
  • Megabyte = 1 million
  • Gigabyte = 1 billion
  • Terabyte = 1 trillion
  • Petabyte = 1 quadrillion
  • Exabyte = 1 quintillion bytes

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Bits and Bytes

  • Storage is listed in bytes
  • Telecommunication capacity (bandwidth) is listed in bits per second (bps)

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Bytes Defined

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Get Out Your Crystal Ball

  • If you are producing products with a significant chip-based component, the chips inside that product rapidly fall in value
  • It is great when it makes your product cheaper and opens up new markets for your firm
  • It can be deadly if you overproduce and have excess inventory sitting on shelves for long periods of time
  • Moore’s Law impacts mundane management tasks too

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The Death of Moore’s Law?

  • Moore’s Law is possible because the distance between the pathways inside silicon chips gets smaller with each successive generation
  • Since the pathways are closer together, electrons travel shorter distances
  • If electrons travel half the distance to make a calculation, that means the chip is twice as fast
  • This shrinking can’t go on forever
  • Three interrelated forces—size, heat, and power—threaten to slow down the Moore’s Law gravy train

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The Death of Moore’s Law?

  • Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google have all built massive data centers in the Pacific Northwest in order to benefit from cheap hydroelectric power
  • The chief eco officer at Sun Microsystems has claimed that computers draw four to five percent of the world’s power
  • Google’s chief technology officer has said that the firm spends more to power its servers than the cost of the servers themselves
  • Chips can’t get smaller forever because chip pathways can’t be shorter than a single molecule and actual physical limit may be higher

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Buying Time

  • Multicore microprocessors: Microprocessors with two or more (typically lower power) calculating processor cores on the same piece of silicon
  • For many applications, the multicore chips will outperform a single speedy chip, while running cooler and drawing less power
  • Multicore processors are now mainstream
  • Today, most PCs and laptops sold have at least a two-core (dual-core) processor
  • In 2010, Intel began shipping PC processors with eight cores, while AMD introduced a 12 core chip

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Buying Time

  • Multicore processors can run older software written for single-brain chips
  • They usually do this by using only one core at a time
  • In order to take full advantage of multicore chips, applications need to be rewritten to split up tasks so that smaller portions of a problem are executed simultaneously inside each core
  • Writing code for execution in a multicore environment is challenging

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Buying Time

  • Another approach to extending the life of Moore’s Law is using stacked or three-dimensional semiconductors
  • Semiconductors that are manufactured as a stack of multiple, interconnected layers instead of in one flat plane
  • In this approach, a flat chip is sliced into pieces, and then the pieces are reconnected vertically, thus making a sort of “silicon sandwich”
  • The chips are both faster and cooler since electrons travel shorter distances

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Bringing Brains Together: Supercomputing and Grid Computing

  • Supercomputers: Computers that are among the fastest of any in the world at the time of their introduction
  • Supercomputing was once the domain of governments and high-end research labs
  • Modern supercomputing is done via massively parallel processing
  • Massively parallel: Computers designed with many microprocessors that work together, simultaneously, to solve problems

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Bringing Brains Together: Supercomputing and Grid Computing

  • Grid computing: A type of computing that uses special software to enable several computers to work together on a common problem as if they were a massively parallel supercomputer
  • Multicore, massively parallel, and grid computing are all related in that each attempts to lash together multiple computing devices so that they can work together to solve problems

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Bringing Brains Together: Supercomputing and Grid Computing

  • The dark side to Moore’s Law is discarded tech junk, referred to as electronic waste or e-waste
  • e-waste: Discarded, obsolete technology
  • Recycling is a solution to the problem
  • E-waste contains mainstream materials like aluminum and plastics as well as more valuable materials like gold, silver, platinum, and copper

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Bringing Brains Together: Supercomputing and Grid Computing

  • There is a disconnect between consumers and managers who want to do good and those efforts that are actually doing good
  • The following points show how difficult addressing this problem will be
  • The complexities of the modern value chain
  • The vagaries of international law
  • The nefarious actions of those willing to put profits above principle
  • The process of recycling is extremely labor intensive
  • Disregard of ethical recycling imperatives can tarnish a brand

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