CHAPTER 1

Major Trends in Software

Software in the form of computer programs is the machinery thatdrives digital systems. In that narrow sense, it is computer code. Buta key is that it is indeed "soft." First, it is soft in that it can be easilychanged and updated, much more easily than hardware. Second, it issoft in that it can be copied and shared without any significant costof the sharing.

The characteristic of being able to share a good indefinitelywithout it running out applies to data and knowledge as well ascomputer code. Throughout this book, I will often use the term"software" in the broadest sense—code, data, and knowledgerepresented in that data—when discussing its impact.

The term "data" brings up the image of tables of numbers,but it is much more than that. The human body of knowledge islargely stored and passed on in the form of text, sound, and images;increasingly, that knowledge is preserved and organized in digitalform and accessed by software programs. Knowledge and our abilityto find it, create it, and share it is a fundamental trait distinguishinghuman society. Knowledge can grow with few limits if we preserveit and find ways to discover what we need to know quickly.

The focus of this book on software does not negate the impactof hardware advances. As I have noted, an increasing number ofphysical products incorporate digital processors and thus software.This expansion of "digital systems" is part of the trend of softwarebecoming more pervasive in our lives. The expansion of systemsdriven by software will continue.

Why does software change the nature and speed of technologyevolution and its impact on society? The following subsectionshighlight key trends accelerating that impact.

Exponential growth in computer power

The processing power available to software grows exponentiallyas we periodically upgrade our hardware, buy new hardwaresystems, or add servers to a network. Continuing improvement indigital processor speed and memory storage allows more complexsoftware to operate quickly enough to be useful and to be affordable.Famously, Moore's Law says that digital processor and memory chipsimprove exponentially in complexity (doubling in the number of coreprocessing elements—transistors—on the chips every 18 months).Exponential growth creates amazing progress—with Moore's Lawrate corresponding to the number of transistors on a chip increasingby a factor of over 32,000 in 24 years. If that continued and wastranslated directly into computing speed, what takes 32,000 seconds(more than 9 hours) to compute today will only take one second in24 years.

It appears that Moore's Law can continue for quite a while,with both improvements in basic processes and the use of multiplesemiconductor layers on a chip (moving from a flat architectureto a 3D architecture). In a February 2012 talk where he predictedthe continuation of this trend, Intel CEO Paul Otellini pointed outthat Intel moved from a 32-nanometer process for chips in 2009 toa smaller 22-nanometer process for its Ivy Bridge chips in 2012,allowing more transistors per chip.

Nathan Myhrvold, a physicist by training and the former ChiefTechnology Officer at Microsoft, put this trend somewhat differentlyin a chapter of Talking Back to the Machine; Computers and HumanAspiration (edited by Peter J. Denning). He claimed that computingpower has increased by a factor of one million in the last 25 years(speaking in 1999) and that it should increase by a factor of onemillion in the next twenty years; he felt this growth could continuefor at least 40 years. That rate of growth means that in 30 years,computers of comparable price will be able to do in 30 seconds whatit takes today a million years to do, he noted.

The trend may even be accelerating when translated into thesupport it can give software. Multiple microprocessor "cores"(processing units) are put on one chip, allowing more than one thingto be done at once on the chip—allowing more than one softwareprogram to be run simultaneously. For example, your smartphonemight be finding news relevant to you while you dictate a messageto be sent as text. Intel researchers were working on a 48-coreprocessor for smartphones and tablets in 2012, targeting five to 10years to market.

There are other methods on the horizon that could allowcontinuing growth in computing power if current approaches reacha limit. In October 2012, it was announced that David J. Winelandof the US National Institute of Standards and Technology wouldbe awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for ground-breakingexperimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation ofindividual quantum systems." Wineland's group has demonstratedcomputing operations based on the cited research that have...