Guest Post: Why our existing technology needs to work smarter when Moore is less

One of the beauties of having technology in your business is that new hardware gets better over the years without increasing in price.

By Charles Duncombe, director of luxury holiday company, Holidays Please

One of the beauties of having technology in your business is that new hardware gets better over the years without increasing in price.

This is thanks to Moore’s law which observes that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits has doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented.

In other words your processing power virtually doubles every year without really adding to raw material costs.

It’s the reason why in a game of chess today, your mobile phone when playing against a supercomputer of yesteryear, would simply take its arm, drag it across the board and dispatch the supercomputer’s chess pieces into the nearest bin.

It would then spray-can a “loser” emoji on the board and walk off, probably with its trousers halfway down its bottom.

Unfortunately Moore’s law is no more and this could have far reaching implications.

The doubling of processing power has slowed from every 12 months to every 18 months. And there is problem in that transistors are now only a few atoms wide.

If you start to divide things any more, then a mushroom shaped cloud appears over your factory. So without new avenues of invention we may be approaching the limits of processing power.

In a world where we have just “thrown more hardware at it when things get slow” we might have to change our thinking and start to get as much as we can from the processing power that we will have at the time.

The shutters may be coming down on the all you can eat processing buffet.

It means that our technology in the future is going to have to work smarter. Our tech teams are going to have to work harder to make their database queries run quicker, web pages load faster and generally get more from the hardware that they have got.

The problem is that it will be tough to do this when there is more and more data that needs to be processed and that the complexity of this data is growing as well.

So what can you do now to help your future hardware efficiently deal with the explosion of data that will inevitably arrive?

The key is ensuring that your technology is built on solid and efficient foundations.

Make sure that your tech team are currently building systems that can be added to in the future without the need for “hacks and workarounds”.

And it might be that you are the problem. Are you asking your tech team to work quickly or correctly? They are two very different things.

Future functionality should dovetail with your existing platform rather than being some unsightly appendage.

With the right base, simple, efficient code can be written that gently touches your hardware rather than smacking it in the face with a wet haddock.

Your technology should be built like a pyramid from the ground up, as opposed to a motorcycle display team relying on one poor legacy system at the bottom praying that you don’t hit a bump in the road.

And we know when it comes to technology there are always bumps in the road. So when Moore is less we need to learn to work smarter to get more from less.