Does it help if I say that “recursion” is not something which is true or false of a given system, but rather, something by which one version of a system differs from another?
The question is not “Is Intel recursive?” but rather, “Which of these two systems is the case? Does intervening on Intel to provide them with much less or much more computing power, tremendously slow or accelerate their progress? Or would it have only small fractional effects?”
In the former case, the research going into Moore’s Law is being kept rigidly on track by the computers output by Moore’s Law, and this would make it plausible that the exponential form of Moore’s Law was due primarily to this effect.
In the latter case, computing power is only loosely coupled to Intel’s research activities, and we have to search for other explanations for Moore’s Law, such as that the market’s sensitivity to computing power is logarithmic and so Intel scales its resources as high as necessary to achieve a certain multiplicative improvement, but no higher than that.
@Pearson: There’s a huge variety of Moore’s Laws, for disk space, for memory bandwidth, etc. etc., and I am simply using “Moore’s Law” to range over the whole exponential bucket.
Does it help if I say that “recursion” is not something which is true or false of a given system, but rather, something by which one version of a system differs from another?
The question is not “Is Intel recursive?” but rather, “Which of these two systems is the case? Does intervening on Intel to provide them with much less or much more computing power, tremendously slow or accelerate their progress? Or would it have only small fractional effects?”
In the former case, the research going into Moore’s Law is being kept rigidly on track by the computers output by Moore’s Law, and this would make it plausible that the exponential form of Moore’s Law was due primarily to this effect.
In the latter case, computing power is only loosely coupled to Intel’s research activities, and we have to search for other explanations for Moore’s Law, such as that the market’s sensitivity to computing power is logarithmic and so Intel scales its resources as high as necessary to achieve a certain multiplicative improvement, but no higher than that.
@Pearson: There’s a huge variety of Moore’s Laws, for disk space, for memory bandwidth, etc. etc., and I am simply using “Moore’s Law” to range over the whole exponential bucket.