Industry Expert Blogs

Moore's Law continues to change the world. But algorithmic advances have been every bit as critical for driving electronics.

How confident are we that algorithms of tomorrow are a good fit for existing semiconductor chips or new computational fabrics under development? With algorithmic advances outpacing hardware advances, even the most advanced deep-learning model could be deployed on a chip as small as a $5 Raspberry Pi.

Which solves faster: a top modern algorithm on a 1980s processor or a 1980s algorithm running on a top modern processor? The surprising answer is that often it’s a new algorithm on an old processor.

While Moore’s Law gets a lot of attention as the driver of rapid advance of electronics, it is only one of the drivers. We regularly forget that algorithmic advances beat Moore’s Law in many cases.

Professor Martin Groetschel observed that a linear programming problem that would take 82 years to solve in 1988 could be solved in one minute in 2003. Hardware accounted for 1,000 times speedup, while algorithmic advance accounted for 43,000 times. Similarly, MIT professor Dimitris Bertsimas showed that the algorithm speedup between 1991 and 2013 for mixed integer solvers was 580,000 times, while the hardware speedup of peak supercomputers increased only a meager 320,000 times. Similar results are rumored to take place in other classes of constrained optimization problems and prime number factorization.

What does that mean for AI?

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