On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 5:56 AM, Udhay Shankar N <ud...@pobox.com> wrote: > In the medium term (by which I mean 5-15 years) we're going to reach the > end of the exponential curve of increasing processing power that Gordon > Moore noticed back in the late 1960s. Atoms are on the order of one > nanometre in size; it's hard to see how we can miniaturize our > integrated circuits below the 10nm scale. And at that point, there's > going to be a big shake-up in the semiconductor business. In particular, > Intel, AMD and the usual players won't be able to compete on the basis > of increasing circuit density any more; just as the megahertz wars ended > around 2005 due to heat dissipation, the megaflop wars will end some > time between 2015 and 2020 due to the limits of miniaturization.
Sweet, maybe more developers will start focusing on game mechanics rather than throwing polys, shaders, vertex/normal/etc mapped textures, rag dolls, barrels, boxes ... down my graphic/physics card's throat. It doesn't surprise me that the most critically acclaimed games this last year were small kitchy independent titles largely distributed over proprietary digital networks or over the Internet. Casey
