Blog: Software Progress Beats Moore's Law

Software Progress Beats Moore's Law
New York Times (03/07/11) Steve Lohr

Computing performance improvements resulting from better algorithms are more common than improvements attributable to faster processors, contradicting the conventional wisdom that hardware outpaces software in terms of computing developments, concludes a White House-commissioned report. The White House advisory report cites research, including a study of progress over a 15-year span on a benchmark production-planning task, which found that the speed of completing the calculations improved by a factor of 43 million. "The ingenuity that computer scientists have put into algorithms have yielded performance improvements that make even the exponential gains of Moore's Law look trivial," says University of Washington professor Edward Lazowska. He says that this progress can be seen in the development of artificial intelligence fields such as language comprehension, speech recognition, and computer vision.

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