Fast, Cheap Computing and its

Business Implications

©FlatWorld 2021
 Some Definitions

• Moore’s Law: Chip performance per dollar doubles every

eighteen months.
• microprocessor: Part of the computer that executes the
instructions of a computer program.
• random-access memory (RAM): Fast, chip-based volatile
storage in a computing device
• volatile memory: Storage that is wiped clean when
power is cut off from a device.
• nonvolatile memory: Storage that retains data even
when powered down.

©FlatWorld 2021
 Some Definitions (cont’d)

• flash memory: Nonvolatile, chip-based storage.

• solid state electronics: Semiconductor-based devices.
• semiconductor: Substance such as silicon dioxide used
inside most computer chips that is capable of enabling
and inhibiting the flow of electricity.
• optical fiber line: High-speed glass or plastic-lined
networking cable used in telecommunications.

©FlatWorld 2021
 Advancing Rates of Technology (Silicon,
Storage, Telecom)

©FlatWorld 2021
 Get Out Your Crystal Ball
• price elasticity: Rate at which the demand for a product
or service fluctuates with price change.
• Evolving waves of computing:
• First wave (1960s) - Mainframe computers
• Second wave (1970s) - Minicomputers
• Third wave (1980s) - PCs
• Fourth wave (1990s) - Internet computing
• Fifth wave (2000s) - Smartphone revolution
• Sixth and current wave (2010s) - Pervasive computing
• Involves embedding intelligence and communications in all sorts of
mundane devices.
• Seventh wave in the future?
• Computing of huge, remote brains out to all sorts of “edge” devices.
• Vision systems in driverless cars, voice recognition in home
speakers, RFID tags for luggage, brains inside robot vacuum cleaners
©FlatWorld 2021
 Tech Everywhere: From the Smart
Thermostat to a Tweeting Diaper

• Nest (Nest Labs) is loaded with Moore’s Law smarts:

• Motion sensors to tell if anyone’s in a room.
• A temperature sensor.
• A Wi-Fi connection to grab weather conditions outside.
• It even runs Linux.
• Current “dumb” thermostats control about half of the
energy use in a typical U.S. home.
• Nest users report shaving their heating and cooling bills
by about 20 percent on average.
• Saving a collective two billion kilowatt hours in two years.

©FlatWorld 2021
 Tech Everywhere: From the Smart
Thermostat to a Tweeting Diaper
(cont’d)
• Other examples of fast, cheap
computing showing up in products
include:
• An umbrella that receives wireless
weather reports and will flash when
rain is likely.
• Smart billboards in Japan that peer
back at passersby, guess at their
demographics, and instantly change
advertising for on-the-spot targeting.
• Smart license plates that contact
paramedics when a car crashes.
• Raspberry Pi, a computer with some
models smaller than two sticks of gum
©FlatWorld 2021 that can run a full PC operating
system and cost as little as $5.
 Tech Everywhere: From the Smart
Thermostat to a Tweeting Diaper
(cont’d)
• microcontrollers: Special-purpose
computing devices that don’t have an
operating system and can’t do as
much as general purpose computers or
smartphones.
• Most contain a processor, memory and
input/output (I/O) peripherals on a single
chip.
• Some refer to these new devices as the
Source: vlabo/Shutterstock.com
Internet of Things (loT): A vision where
low-cost sensors, processors, and
communication are embedded into a wide
array of products and our environment,
allowing a vast network to collect data,
©FlatWorld 2021 analyze input, and automatically
coordinate collective action.
 Moore’s Law Inside Your Medicine
Cabinet…and Your Colon
• Moore’s Law shows the potential for low-cost
computing to improve health care quality while lowering
costs.
• GlowCap from Vitality, Inc., and Adhere Tech are two firms that
offer a “smart” pill bottle that will flash when you’re supposed
to take your medicine.
• Bottles are programmed to:
• Know a patient’s dosage schedule
• Trigger refills
• Notify patients, caregivers, or pharmacies when dosage is missed
• Patients who used “smart” pill bottles reported medication
adherence of 98 percent.

©FlatWorld 2021
 Moore’s Law Inside Your Medicine
Cabinet…and Your Colon (cont’d)

• There might also be a chip

inside the pills.
• Proteus, has developed
ingestible tech, a sensor made
of food and vitamin materials
that can be swallowed in
medicine.
• The sensor is activated and
powered by the body’s digestive
acids.
• Once digested, the chip sends
out a signal with vitals such as
heart rate, body angle,
temperature, sleep, and more.

©FlatWorld 2021
 Moore’s Law Inside Your Medicine
Cabinet…and Your Colon (cont’d)

• Pills that chat with mobile phones could help promote

telemedicine:
• Bring health care to hard-to-reach rural populations.
• The Medtronic PillCam comes with up to two cameras that, once
swallowed, can relay images of your innards.

©FlatWorld 2021
 Tech’s Price/Performance Trends in
Action: Amazon Kindle and Apple Music
Storage

Amazon Kindle Apple

Fourth
First Generation iPod iCloud
Generation
250 MB 2 GB 5 GB 5 GB
November 2007 September 2011 October 2001 October 2011
$399 $79 $399 Free

©FlatWorld 2021
 Bits and Bytes

• Computers express data as bits that are either one or

zero.
• Eight bits form a byte.
• A kilobyte refers to roughly a thousand bytes, or a thousand
characters.
• Megabyte = 1 million, gigabyte = 1 billion, terabyte = 1 trillion,
petabyte = 1 quadrillion, and exabyte = 1 quintillion bytes.
• While storage is most often listed in bytes,
telecommunication capacity (bandwidth) is often listed
in bits per second (bps).
• The same prefixes apply (Kbps = kilobits, or one thousand bits,
per second, Mbps = megabits per second, Gbps = gigabits per
second, and Tbps = terabits per second).

©FlatWorld 2021
 Bytes Defined

Managerial Definition Exact Amount To Put It in Perspective

One keyboard
1 Byte 8 bits 1 letter or number = 1 byte
character
1 typewritten page = 2 KB
1 Kilobyte
One thousand bytes 210 bytes 1 digital book (Kindle) = approx. 500–800
(KB)
KB
1 digital photo (7 megapixels) = 1.3 MB
1 Megabyte
One million bytes 220 bytes 1 MP3 song = approx. 3 MB
(MB)
1 CD = approx. 700 MB
1 Gigabyte 1 DVD movie = approx. 4.7 GB
One billion bytes 230 bytes
(GB) 1 Blu-ray movie = approx. 25 GB
1 Terabyte Printed collection of the Library of
One trillion bytes 240 bytes
(TB) Congress = 20 TB
1 Petabyte Master copies of the shows and movies
One quadrillion bytes 250 bytes
(PB) available on Netflix (2013) = 3.14 PB
Estimated total data stored in the NSA’s
1 Exabyte Bluffdale, Utah, data center (includes data
One quintillion bytes 260 bytes
(EB) from hard drives, overseas data centers,
cell phones, and more) = 12 EB
©FlatWorld 2021 Estimated total annual amount of data
1 Zettabyte
One sextillion bytes 270
bytes transmitted over the Internet by 2018 = 1.6
(ZB)
 Tech: A Helping Hand to Escape Poverty

• Microprocessors in cell phones are

also transforming the lives of some
of the world’s most desperate
poor.
• Some 93 percent of the world’s
population has access to a mobile
broadband network.
• Three-quarters of the world’s poorest
people get their food and income by
farming.
Source: Somchai Som/Shutterstock.com
• To aid farmers, the Ghanaian firm
Esoko:
• Delivers market prices, farming tips, and
other key info via text message on even
the lowest-end cell phones.
©FlatWorld 2021 • Offers services that range from helping
farmers find transport services or
 The Death of Moore’s Law?

• Moore’s Law is possible because the distance between

the pathways inside silicon chips gets smaller with each
successive generation.
• fabs: Semiconductor fabrication facilities.
• silicon wafers: Thin, circular slice of material used to create
semiconductor device.
• Packing pathways tightly together creates problems
associated with size, heat, and power.
• Chip starts to melt when the processor gets smaller.
• Chips can’t get smaller forever.
• Get too small and a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling
kicks in.

©FlatWorld 2021
 Keep Cool, Server Farm

• The need to cool modern data centers draws a lot of

power and is expensive. Firms try some very creative
approaches:
• Microsoft has submerged over 850 servers on a patch of seabed,
117 feet underwater off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands.
• Facebook has a data center in Sweden, just 70 miles from the
Arctic Circle (average winter temperatures -12°C).
• Green Mountain has a data center inside a Norwegian mountain.
• IBM puts heat to good use by warming a public pool outside
Zurich.
• Server farms are thought to already draw five percent of
all energy use in the United States.

©FlatWorld 2021
 Buying Time

• multicore microprocessors: Contain two or more

calculating processor cores on the same piece of silicon.
• Multicore chips outperform a single speedy chip, while running
cooler and drawing less power.
• Now mainstream, most smartphones, PCs and laptops sold have
at least a two-core (dual-core) processor.
• Can run older software written for single-brain chips by using
only one core at a time.
• Firms are radically boosting speed and efficiency of
chips.
• Use chips that are designed to be really good at a subset of
tasks.
• Taking chips from being paper-flat devices to built-up 3-D affairs.
• Transistors are super-tiny on-off switches in a chip that work
©FlatWorld 2021 collectively to calculate or store things in memory.
 Comparison Chart
Microprocessors ASICs FPGAs

General Purpose
Microprocessors: Sometimes ASICs: Application-specific FPGAs: Field-programmable gate
called CPUs for central integrated circuits are chips arrays can have their on-chip
processing units. designed to do a subset of tasks logic re-routed to get better
Can handle most any tasks, so very quickly and efficiently. performance for a specific task.
you'll find them as the "main Pros: Very fast and power Pros: Faster and more energy-
brain" in your PC (Intel-based) efficient. Great for graphics and efficient than general purpose
and smartphone (ARM-based). AI/machine learning. microprocessors. Can be
Pros: Can do just about anything, Cons: Can be costly to design upgraded via software “in the
so they are far better generalists and expensive to manufacture a field” after installation. A
than ASICs or FPGAs. Supported very custom product. cheaper alternative than
by a large base of existing Players: Nvidia and AMD. Google designing and manufacturing a
software. has built its own AI-specific chip custom but unchangeable ASIC.
Cons: Are slower for many tasks, (the Tensor processing unit), but Cons: ASICs designed from
and chips are power-hungry, only the biggest firms with a scratch for specific tasks can be
requiring more energy. specific need for a massive faster/more efficient.
Players: Intel (leader in PCs and amount of such chips could Players: Intel-owned Altera,
©FlatWorld 2021 servers), ARM (designs are the justify the expense of doing this. Xilinx. Microsoft uses FPGAs for
basis of most smartphone Bing and other cloud tasks.
 New Materials and Quantum Leaps? Thinking
Beyond Moore’s Law—Constraining Silicon

• What’s happening to help stave off the death of Moore’s

Law?
• Scientists are concentrating on improving the very
semiconductor material that chips are made of.
• Future hyperefficient chips may be made out of carbon
nanotubes.
• Optical chips that use light instead of electricity.
• A yet-to-be-proven technology is quantum computing.
• Pharmaceutical companies might be able to create
hyperdetailed representations of the human body that reveal
drug side effects before they’re even tested on humans.
• Might also accurately predict the weather months in advance or
offer unbreakable computer security.

©FlatWorld 2021
 The Power of Parallel: Supercomputing, Grids,
Clusters, and Putting Smarts in the Cloud

• supercomputers: Computers that are among the fastest

of any in the world at the time of their introduction.
• Supercomputing was once considered the domain of governments
and high-end research labs.
• HPC (high performance computing): A term for massively-parallel
computers specifically designed to deliver significantly more
power than conventional off-the-shelf computing technologies.
• Modern supercomputing is done by massively parallel processing:
Computers designed with many microprocessors that work
together, simultaneously, to solve problems.

©FlatWorld 2021
 The Power of Parallel: Supercomputing, Grids,
Clusters, and Putting Smarts in the Cloud (cont’d)

• grid computing: Uses special software to enable several

computers to work together on a common problem as if
they were a massively parallel supercomputer.
• cluster computing: Connecting server computers via
software and networking so that their resources can be
used to collectively solve computing tasks.
• Multicore, massively parallel, grid, and cluster computing
are all related.
• Each attempts to lash together multiple computing devices so
that they can work together to solve problems.

©FlatWorld 2021
 The Power of Parallel: Supercomputing,
Grids, Clusters, and Putting Smarts in
the Cloud (cont’d)
• software as a service (SaaS): Form of cloud computing
where a firm subscribes to a third-party software and
receives a service that is delivered online.
• cloud computing: Replacing computing resources with
services provided over the Internet.
• server farms: Massive network of computer servers
running software to coordinate their collective use.
• latency: Delay in networking and data transfer speeds.
• Low latency systems are faster systems.
• Moore’s Law will likely hit its physical limit soon, but still-
experimental quantum computing could make computers
more powerful.
©FlatWorld 2021
 E-waste: The Dark Side of Moore’s Law

• e-waste: Discarded, often obsolete

technology; also known as
electronic waste.
• Each year the planet generates
over 50 million tons of e-waste and
the results aren’t pretty. Source: zlikovec/Shutterstock.com

• Amount discarded in just one year is

equivalent to throwing away all of the
commercial aircraft ever built
throughout history.
• May be toxic since many components
contain harmful materials such as lead,
cadmium, and mercury. Source: Kelly Schulz/Shutterstock.com

©FlatWorld 2021
 E-waste: The Dark Side of Moore’s Law (cont’d)

• Quick answer would be to recycle.

• Contains mainstream recyclable materials like plastics and
aluminum.
• It also contains small bits of increasingly valuable metals such as
silver, platinum, and copper.
• Done right, recycling produces far less CO2 emissions and other
pollution than mining.
• Sending e-waste abroad can be ten times cheaper than
dealing with it at home.
• Through 2017, China was recycling some 70 percent of the world’s
e-waste, much of it processed in dreadful conditions.
• The reality is that e-waste management is extraordinarily
difficult to monitor and track, and loopholes are rampant.
©FlatWorld 2021
 Yes, You Do Have to Pay Attention to
This Garbage, But the “Internet of
Trash” May Help
• No solutions can make e-waste issues go away
completely, but tech itself will increasingly present
solutions to trash problems.
• Robotics and AI have gotten good enough to be economically
viable for high-volume recycling.
• Waste Management now uses three different types of robots to
separate recycling from contaminants, in some cases doing the
job better, quicker, and more cost-effectively than humans.
• Moore’s law means sensors used for detection are now
cheaper and more accurate, enabling tech to help you put
garbage in the right place.
• Managers will need to think proactively to stay ahead of
legislators.
• They must plan for products’ end-of-life and the waste they
©FlatWorld 2021 create.
 Finding Responsible E-waste Disposers

• How can firms and

individuals choose proper
disposal partners?
• The Basel Action Network e-
Stewards program certifies
firms via a third-party audit.
• The International Association
of Electronics Recyclers
(IAER) also offers audited
electronics recycler
certification.
• Firms certified as ISO 9001
and ISO 14001 compliant
attest to quality management
and environmental
©FlatWorld 2021
processes.