Optimizing Cloud Native Java, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7. Hardware and Operating Systems

Why should Java developers care about hardware?

For many years the computer industry has been driven by Moore’s law, a hypothesis made by Intel founder Gordon Moore about long-term trends in processor capability. The law (really an observation or extrapolation) can be framed in a variety of ways, but one of the most usual is:

The number of transistors on a mass-produced chip roughly doubles every 18 months.

Moore’s law (informally)

This phenomenon represents an exponential increase in computer power over time. It was originally cited in 1965, so represents an incredible long-term trend, unparalleled in the history of computation. The effects of Moore’s law have been transformative in many (if not most) areas of the modern world. The death of Moore’s law has been repeatedly proclaimed for decades now. However, there are very good reasons to suppose that, for all practical purposes, this incredible progress in chip technology has (finally) come to an end:

Transistors can only get so small and, eventually, the more permanent laws of physics get in the way. Already transistors can be measured on an atomic scale, with the smallest ones commercially available only 3 nanometers wide, barely wider than a strand of human DNA (2.5nm). While there’s still room to make them smaller (in 2021, IBM announced the successful creation of 2-nanometer chips), such progress has become prohibitively expensive and slow, putting reliable gains into question. ...