this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Moore's law is about circuit density, not about storage, so the premise is invalidated in the first place.
There is research being done into 5D storage crystals, where a disc can theoretically hold up to 360TB of data, but don't hold your breath about them being available soon.
This is true, but.....
Moore's Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore's Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.
So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore's Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.
You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.
And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80's which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.
Same curve.
Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.
The implication of, "That's not Moore's Law", is that the observation isn't valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.
Even if you're technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.
Why aren't we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren't we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.
While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it's actually more important/interesting than Moore's Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.
Yeah taken as a guideline and observation that computer speeds/storage/etc continue to improve, I think it’s fair. It may not always be double, but it is still significantly different than other physical processes which have “stagnated” by a similar metric (like top speed on an average vehicle or miles per gallon).