Keeping up with Moore's Law proves difficult for Intel
For the last 40 years, Moore's Law predicted that processors could double in power every two years. Intel acknowledges that it's on more of a two-and-a-half-year cycle.
It may be time for another revision to Moore's Law, if Intel's recent troubles keeping pace are any indication.
In a conference call on Wednesday, Intel confirmed that its upcoming generation of processors, codenamed Cannonlake, will not launch until the second half of 2017 -- nearly three years after the previous generation was made available. To bridge the gap, Intel plans to launch the third iteration of its current-generation processors, codenamed Kaby Lake, in the second half of 2016.
Moore's Law, which was named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, is one of the most celebrated ideas in the technology industry. While not a "law," but rather more of a prediction, Moore's Law was posited in a paper Moore published in 1965, predicting that every year for at least the next decade, processors would shrink in size and the components within them would double. In 1975, after his prediction held up, Moore revised his 50-year-old estimate, saying that the doubling effect would occur every two years as manufacturing issues and costs started to rise. Since then, his prediction has held true...until recently.
Intel, who's processors power most of the world's desktops and laptops, struggled to deliver its Broadwell chip -- the first to use a 14-nanometer architecture -- to market due to problems manufacturing the advanced technology. Intel finally began production of the chip in 2014, about two-and-a half years after its previous generation of chip, which was based on a 22-nanometer architecture. The company predicts the same timetable with Cannonlake.
"The last two technology transitions have signaled that our cadence today is closer to 2.5 years than 2," Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said in an earnings call with investors on Wednesday.
What ultimately guides Moore's Law is the idea that the number of components in an integrated circuit, the brains of a computer, would double every two years, thereby boosting performance. In order for that to occur, however, transistors, which switch electrical signals on and off so devices can process information and perform tasks, need to increasingly be added to chips. The more transistors on a chip, the faster that chip can process information.
In order to keep Moore's Law going, processor manufacturers, like Intel, need to make transistors smaller. The original size of a transistor was half an inch long. The next generation of Intel's processors aims at getting transistors down to 10 nanometers, which is smaller than the vast majority of viruses affecting human health. In other words, a 10-nanometer transistor is very, very small.
While Moore's Law is about devices becoming smarter and more powerful over time, the race to make smaller transistors has allowed for "smart" devices to get smaller. Apple's iPhone 6, for instance, is approximately 1 million times more powerful than an IBM computer produced in 1975. The iPhone 6 can fit into a pocket; the IBM computer took up an entire room.
One other contribution Moore's Law has made to the chip industry? It's kept companies on track.
"Rather than become something that chronicled the progress of the industry, Moore's Law became something that drove it," Moore said in an online interview with semiconductor industry supplier ASML in December.
Still, as Intel's acknowledgement of a new lifecycle shows, Moore's Law is becoming harder and harder to stick to. Costs to develop processors are constantly on the rise and with demand for PCs -- long a driver of advanced chip technology -- slower than Intel and others would like, companies are looking at ways to maximize revenue on the products they already have.
Despite the slowdown, Krzanich isn't ready to give up on Moore's Law just yet. He told investors that predictions of the death of Moore's Law have been "disproved...many times over" in the past. He also signaled hope that Intel could get back to a two-year update cycle in the future.
Intel's talk of Moore's Law followed the announcement of better-than-expected earnings for the second quarter. The company posted a profit of $2.7 billion on $13.2 billion in revenue.
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Welcome to the new Reddit, watch your mouth and stop complaining
Reddit's new CEO is cracking down on the type of posts published on the popular social news site. No longer allowed: Private data, or anything that incites violence.
What is Reddit?
That's the $50 million question the company and the 164 million people who visit the site each month are grappling with.
The company's co-founder and new CEO, Steve Huffman, on Thursday laid out a set of new policies that will restrict what users can post on the site.
"As Reddit has grown, we've seen additional examples of how unfettered free speech can make Reddit a less enjoyable place to visit, and can even cause people harm outside of Reddit," he wrote under his username "spez" at the beginning of a town hall forum on the site called an "Ask Me Anything," or AMA.
Among the posts that are no longer allowed: discussion of illegal activities; publication of people's private information; anything that incites violence, harassment, bullying, abuse; and anything sexually suggestive of minors.
"We've spent the last few days here discussing and agree that an approach like this allows us as a company to repudiate content we don't want to associate with the business, but gives individuals freedom to consume it if they choose," he added. "This is what we will try, and if the hateful users continue to spill out into mainstream reddit, we will try more aggressive approaches."
For years since its founding in 2005, the site has been a free-wheeling, nearly anything-goes collection of Internet forums run primarily by volunteers and users, who call themselves Redditors. It's been the home of people discussing their struggles with cancer, swapping theories about "Star Wars," and debating politics. It's become one of the most popular websites in the world, leading the company to describe itself as "the front page of the Internet."
But it's become home to some of the worst aspects of Web culture as well. In the past year, Reddit has become a haven of racist and hateful communities. Redditors were also at the center of a nude-celebrity photo-hacking scandal. And the site has served as a staging ground for attacks against feminist critics of video games.
Reddit has seen change in the past year. Three people have occupied its CEO job since November alone. The company has also seen the return of its other co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, as executive chairman, and a $50 million investment from some of Silicon Valley's top money men. But with that money has come an expectation that Reddit will be more than a loose collection of Internet forums where anything goes. It's expected to become a place that will capitalize on its popularity.
"The trolls are winning," Ellen Pao, Reddit's former CEO who stepped down last week, wrote Thursday in an opinion piece in the Washington Post. "We were naive in our initial expectations for the Internet, an early Internet pioneer told me recently. We focused on the huge opportunity for positive interaction and information sharing. We did not understand how people could use it to harm others."
Now, industry insiders say Reddit must balance what it wants to be with what its users expect.
"There's a huge schism that has appeared between the business and users -- the culture," said David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "This is important because the product is the community, unlike Amazon or something. If you alienate your users, there's no product left; the thing of value is the community they've built."
Reddit's executives seem to understand that particular challenge. "No company is perfect at addressing these hard issues," Huffman wrote. "Freedom of expression is important to us, but it's more important to us that we at Reddit be true to our mission."
Reddit is part owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Conde Nast, which publishes magazines including GQ and Vanity Fair. It also raised $50 million in funding from prominent venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, high-profile investors Ron Conway and Peter Thiel, and entertainers such as Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg.
The debate rages on
Users participating in the forum were quick to push back on Huffman, and the new rules he appeared to be imposing on the company. There were more than 8,000 comments posted within the first hour of Huffman's AMA.
Some seized on the perceived inconsistency between the company's mission as a home of thoughtful debate, and the home of free speech that users have come to expect. Since taking over Tuesday, Huffman and Ohanian have begun reminding users of this difference, presumably in preparation for the new rules they planned to impose.
As an example, Huffman pointed to a community called RapingWomen, as one that would definitely be banned from the site. "They are encouraging people to rape," he wrote.
One member, Seven-Three, was dismissive: "So speech that you like is fine, speech that you don't like isn't. Got it."
Another user, Warlizard, asked how much of this push is motivated by Reddit's need to make money. "Zero," Huffman wrote.
To Susan McGregor, assistant director at Columbia's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, these new changes represent Reddit's shift toward an editorial voice, even if it clashes with what some of its users prefer. "It's becoming more and more clear that these changes are coming from the long-term management," she said. "And it's a sign of the maturation of the platform in general."
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Drone maker 3D Robotics sees the future, and it is apps
For Road Trip 2015, we travel to the outskirts of San Diego to check in with a company trying to democratize drone software for the world, a la smartphones and app stores.
SAN DIEGO -- What separates a drone from a smartphone? Well, other than the fact that your iPhone can't fly (yet), drones don't have an equivalent app store.
At least not for the moment, says Jordi Munoz, co-founder of the largest US commercial drone operation, 3D Robotics.
"The smartphone was a product that was intended for a consumer market, and now it went all the way to industrial applications and even the medical industry," Munoz says. "The same is happening with drones."
We're sitting on the second floor of 3DR's San Diego office where, from the window facing south, you can see Tijuana. The Mexican city, less than 10 miles away, is where Munoz grew up. It's also where 3DR's first manufacturing facility sits.
Munoz was just 19 years old when he got involved in the drone market eight years ago. A mostly self-taught programmer, he learned from the Internet and earned what he calls a "Google Ph.D."
Drones, he believes, are a market that's still primed for growth.
3DR started in 2009 selling Lego drone kits in pizza boxes; the first run of 40 sold out in 10 minutes. Today, 3DR sells seven models ranging in price from $550 do-it-yourself kits to $5,400 professional-grade devices. The company has more than 350 employees and is on track to rack up $40 million in sales this year.
Drones will truly take off, he says, when people figure out how best to use them beyond photography and for the simple fun of flying. What that means is that, as with smartphones, developers need to figure out how to build software that works on any drone -- similar to apps like Facebook, which are available on every device.
In that respect, 3DR is aiming to make tools that will be used to build apps for any drone.
Inside the drone nest
3DR is now headquartered out of Berkeley, California, where Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, oversees business operations as the company's CEO.
Anderson left his post at Wired in 2012 to partner full-time with Munoz, whom he met online.
Anderson understood that his partner was an impressive tinkerer with a big-picture view of the potential future of drones, but Munoz had no idea he was chatting with the head of a popular tech publication in 2007. Munoz was simply attracted to Anderson's community website, DIY Drones, which the journalist had set up that year to foster a hobbyist community and, eventually, to help others build their own drones.
Munoz, who thinks he was around the seventh person to register on the site, used it to show off his prototype projects and share code with fellow enthusiasts, including his groundbreaking autopilot system created from the innards of a Nintendo Wii remote. It became clear to Anderson in 2009, when he wanted to begin selling more DIY kits over the Internet, that he could turn to Munoz to get it done more efficiently. That partnership led to 3DR's incorporation in 2009.
As Munoz takes me into a warehouse in San Diego, 3DR employees in black T-shirts tasked with creating made-to-order drones are standing around a gigantic mutant device that's comprised of more than half a dozen motors and held together with 3D-printed piping. Behind them, a huge square section of the floor is enveloped in black nets and used for testing devices indoors.
The 3DR staffers are eager to show Munoz what they've been working on -- a drone that will deliver a special clamp to telephone poles for running new wire, like the fiber-optic cables that deliver ultrafast Internet connections. Munoz marvels at the drone's size and picks it up, feeling the weight.
"It weighs as much as it looks," he says with a laugh. For most people, something that size looks like it may weigh hundreds of pounds. For Munoz, who understands just how light drones have become in the last 10 years, the drone weighs an appropriate 45 pounds, or more than 10 times the amount of his company's standard vehicles.
"I didn't even know they were doing this," Munoz says with a shrug as he guides me through the rest of the warehouse, which is mostly used as a shipping center for the Tijuana plant.
3DR, given its DIY roots, is a no-frills startup, at least with respect to its San Diego offices. There is no free food and you won't find any nap pods or hulking commuter shuttle buses. An upper section of the warehouse floor was to be turned into a kind of game room with hardwood flooring, but it sits empty with a few lonely Ping-Pong tables and an open wall overlooking the warehouse floor. Munoz says they haven't gotten around to remodeling it.
Munoz resisted leaving San Diego for Berkeley because he wanted to stay close to his family and where he grew up. As Anderson and others take on bigger roles at 3DR, Munoz gets to work on new technologies and features that help drones become more powerful and less costly.
"I don't think drones are going to be just limited to delivery and photography," he says. Munoz likens the new and undiscovered ways we'll use drones to the versatility of different smartphone components. For instance, a smartphone camera was once restricted to snapping shots like a traditional camera. But now, it can now used with sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes as a measuring device. Or it can help software programs see and map environments.
"It's amazing how similar they are," he says.
Democratizing drones
The smartphone-to-drone comparison is apt. The term "drone" is shorthand for the kind of unmanned and somewhat autonomous aerial vehicle that now more resembles an alien spacecraft than remote-controlled airplanes of the '80s and '90s.
Part of what's driven the boom in drone sales has been the popularity of smartphones. Nearly every single component inside the modern-day smartphone, from the GPS chip and camera to the battery and the processor, were made cheaper by Apple, Samsung and others racing to make handsets thinner, faster and more powerful every year.
Many drones are now controlled by apps on smartphones as well.
Fifteen years ago, it would have been impossible to cobble together enough computer parts to make a remote-controlled aerial vehicle without spending thousands of dollars, let alone one that could be flown without expertise. Now, the consumer drone market is exploding. Goldman Sachs estimates sales will triple by 2017 from this year's $1.4 billion. It's not just hobbyists. Industries from Hollywood and real estate to architecture and ecology are finding ways to utilize high-flying robots with high-definition cameras. The cost is getting cheaper every day.
"Gyroscopes used to cost $5,000 to $10,000," Munoz said. "And the cheapest one was $300 -- and you needed three" to help a drone fly. Today, you can buy a drone with all the gyroscopes and other requisite sensors to keep it stabilized in midair for around $50 from Amazon.
"This is stuff that used to be military industrial technology; you can buy it at RadioShack now," wrote Anderson in Foreign Policy magazine in 2013. "I've never seen technology move faster than it's moving right now and that's because of the supercomputer in your pocket."
And as a result of improvements in the smartphone and tablet apps created to fly these machines, maintaining and upgrading a drone is also becoming easier. That, in turn, is opening the market to new types of customers.
"The magic of computers is they solve that mechanical complexity and transfer it to the software," Munoz says. The reason drones began taking off in the post-smartphone world was not just that costs were coming down, Munoz adds, but also that what we know as drones today were suddenly "very robust, very easy to repair and easier to fly."
Compared to a complex rotor-powered model helicopter, the $1,000, 3.3-pound 3DR Solo, which the company released in May, is a mind-blowing engineering feat.
"Humans cannot control four motors" at the same time, Munoz says of the standard quadcopter drone design that has displaced traditional helicopter and airplane designs for consumer aircraft. But thanks to a handful of sensors, cameras and other smartphone tech coupled with stabilizing algorithms, motion detection and GPS, a drone like the Solo can be flown with ease within minutes of unpacking it.
Unlike its biggest competitors, China-based DJI and French drone maker Parrot, 3DR offers a majority of its software components as open source, so anyone can download and use the code and modify it. The company also provides tools and mobile apps to develop your own drone software and to better understand and utilize all the data drones produce mid-flight.
Of course, 3DR has a long way to go before it can compete on the scale of DJI. That company, which was founded in 2006 and has nearly 3,000 employees and offices around the world, controls around 70 percent of the global drone market, according to Goldman Sachs.
DJI is also on track to pull in $1 billion in sales this year. That's thanks to its popular Phantom line of easy-to-use drones, which are known for their sleek white, Apple-like look and for being the primary device of choice for drunk pilots who want to fly the device dangerously close to the White House.
3DR wants to continue fostering the open source software community from which it was born in the hopes it will create the drone and app platform everyone begins using, from rookies to the most advanced, software-literate pilots.
"Maybe in a year or two years, we'll release a drone where it doesn't matter how stupid you are, how drunk you are," Munoz adds, "You won't be able to crash it."
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