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by James Gosling.
Original Post: Moore's Law meets Pricing
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Feed Description: I've been inescapably tagged as "the Java guy", despite the fact that I havn't worked in the Java product organization for a couple of years (I do still kibbitz). These days I work at Sun's research lab about two thirds of the time, and do customer visits and talks the other third. For more detail...
There's a great article
in the Economist this month about the current mess that's happening in
software pricing. Moore's
law's predictions about the number of transistors on a chip look like
they'll continue to hold for quite a while, but we're quickly losing the
ability to translate that into clock rate. This is driving every chip
manufacturer to create multicore systems. Probably the most extreme is
Sun's Niagra,
with (effectively) 32 CPUs. Software vendors like Oracle havn't been
cranking up their prices while Moore's law has been expressed in the clock
rate, but now that it's being expressed in CPU cores, their pricing is set
to track Moore's law (IT managers: panic now). It seems to me that this
whole flap can be fixed by a bit of spin doctoring, weasel wording,
marketing: there's no such thing as a multicore chip — they're single CPUs
that do a great job of supporting multithreading. (wink)
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There's a great