David Patterson, University of California professor, Google engineer, and RISC pioneer, says there’s no better time than now to be a computer architect.

That’s because Moore’s Law really is over, he says: “We are now a factor of 15 behind where we should be if Moore’s Law were still operative. We are in the post-Moore’s Law era.”

This means, Patterson told engineers attending the 2018 @Scale Conference held in San Jose last week, that “we’re at the end of the performance scaling that we are used to. When performance doubled every 18 months, people would throw out their desktop computers that were working fine because a friend’s new computer was so much faster.”