7 ms·

"Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today." Remember PCs five years ag

by ilyak 17y ago

"Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today." Remember PCs five years ago? Exactly, not much changed except for multicore, and it's still underused. I'd not expect an average PC in five years to be anything unusual. Mobile devices, on other hand, have a lot of way to grow. Maybe we'd see phones with HD screens and 1GB RAM in five years, and those would run whatever you'd wish.

wglb 17y ago
But the real leverage is in the servers or the grid. Ok, the cloud.
GrandMasterBirt 17y ago
Google powered brain augmentations streaming text-based ads directly to your nightmares? Sorry had to be said :) Moore's Law still holds. Except we realized that doing what we classically did was not working out. Making CPUs faster causes heat problems and those are getting very problematic (remember when computers only needed a heat sink?) So instead of building a faster car, we just build more lanes on the road, so everyone can move quickly. Remember a 2nd core is almost double the capabilities, we just need software to catch up :P
10ren 17y ago
1. no netbooks 2. no iPhones
- BerislavLopac 17y ago
  iPhones and other smartphones. I just bought a 16GB USB stick for the equivalent of $95 (and I live in an expensive country). What was the cost of that kind of (portable) storage space in 2004?
legooolas 17y ago
There are already phones coming out and planned with 800x480 and higher res screens, 1Ghz processors and upwards of 256Mb. Moving up to 720p HD, 1Gb of memory and even quicker/more-cores chips doesn't seem more than a couple of years off. Whether they'll manage to make them any more usable is a different question :)
Retric 17y ago
Computers are more than just it's CPU's # of Ghz's. A top PC from 2004 might look like: CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.0 C @ 3.24 Ghz - Northwood Core 512MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (400 Mhz) 160 GB Harddrive ATA-100 GeForce 6800 17" CRT Monitor Now we would expect 8 times as much RAM and disk space. Far faster CPU's with for cores and a huge L2 cache. 4 - 8x as much RAM on a graphics card with 2700 GFLOPs vs 54 GFLOPs of processing power. And our monitors are both larger, lighter, and have a higher resolution. But, what's most interesting is we are far less CPU bound in 2009 than we where in 2004. PS: A single i7 core would crush a Northwood Pentium 4 clock per clock even limiting it's self to the same instruction set. An 3.4GHz i7 has more floating point performance than a 2004 era graphics card (69 vs 54). Note: I am ignoring the Prescott as it took a Prescott core overclocked to 5.2 GHz to soundly beat the performance of a 64-bit Athlon FX-55 that clocked at 2.6 GHz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4
- jacquesm 17y ago
  The interesting thing to notice here, is that the biggest impact of all that improvement in hardware, when you look at it in a web context actually goes towards increased execution speed of javascript. Most of the other advantages only come out when playing computer games or something like that.
  - roc 17y ago
    I disagree. The biggest change over the last 5 years has to be that we're designing web content for mobile devices in a very serious way. And that is due to many of the 'moore's law' advances that have relatively little to do with javascript execution. (Small-screen quality, cpu/gpu/memory speed, improved communications chips and infrastructure, etc)
- zargon 17y ago
  In 2004 I was using a 2048x1280 display at 112 ppi. Today I can't find a screen over 100 ppi. So in pixel density we have actually gone backwards, except for laptops.
  - 17y ago
sb 17y ago
For me, the same observation holds true for bandwidth. I have had the same bandwidth for a couple of years and see just no reason to upgrade. A 100Mbit (assumed though not explicitly mentioned in the article) line seems just out of reach for now, possibly upgrades to 10Mbits but even that would surprise me very much...

by ilyak 17y ago

wglb 17y ago

But the real leverage is in the servers or the grid. Ok, the cloud.

GrandMasterBirt 17y ago

Google powered brain augmentations streaming text-based ads directly to your nightmares? Sorry had to be said :) Moore's Law still holds. Except we realized that doing what we classically did was not working out. Making CPUs faster causes heat problems and those are getting very problematic (remember when computers only needed a heat sink?) So instead of building a faster car, we just build more lanes on the road, so everyone can move quickly. Remember a 2nd core is almost double the capabilities, we just need software to catch up :P

10ren 17y ago

1. no netbooks 2. no iPhones

BerislavLopac 17y ago
iPhones and other smartphones. I just bought a 16GB USB stick for the equivalent of $95 (and I live in an expensive country). What was the cost of that kind of (portable) storage space in 2004?

legooolas 17y ago

There are already phones coming out and planned with 800x480 and higher res screens, 1Ghz processors and upwards of 256Mb. Moving up to 720p HD, 1Gb of memory and even quicker/more-cores chips doesn't seem more than a couple of years off. Whether they'll manage to make them any more usable is a different question :)

Retric 17y ago

Computers are more than just it's CPU's # of Ghz's. A top PC from 2004 might look like: CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.0 C @ 3.24 Ghz - Northwood Core 512MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (400 Mhz) 160 GB Harddrive ATA-100 GeForce 6800 17" CRT Monitor Now we would expect 8 times as much RAM and disk space. Far faster CPU's with for cores and a huge L2 cache. 4 - 8x as much RAM on a graphics card with 2700 GFLOPs vs 54 GFLOPs of processing power. And our monitors are both larger, lighter, and have a higher resolution. But, what's most interesting is we are far less CPU bound in 2009 than we where in 2004. PS: A single i7 core would crush a Northwood Pentium 4 clock per clock even limiting it's self to the same instruction set. An 3.4GHz i7 has more floating point performance than a 2004 era graphics card (69 vs 54). Note: I am ignoring the Prescott as it took a Prescott core overclocked to 5.2 GHz to soundly beat the performance of a 64-bit Athlon FX-55 that clocked at 2.6 GHz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4

jacquesm 17y ago
The interesting thing to notice here, is that the biggest impact of all that improvement in hardware, when you look at it in a web context actually goes towards increased execution speed of javascript. Most of the other advantages only come out when playing computer games or something like that.
- roc 17y ago
  I disagree. The biggest change over the last 5 years has to be that we're designing web content for mobile devices in a very serious way. And that is due to many of the 'moore's law' advances that have relatively little to do with javascript execution. (Small-screen quality, cpu/gpu/memory speed, improved communications chips and infrastructure, etc)
zargon 17y ago
In 2004 I was using a 2048x1280 display at 112 ppi. Today I can't find a screen over 100 ppi. So in pixel density we have actually gone backwards, except for laptops.
- 17y ago

sb 17y ago

For me, the same observation holds true for bandwidth. I have had the same bandwidth for a couple of years and see just no reason to upgrade. A 100Mbit (assumed though not explicitly mentioned in the article) line seems just out of reach for now, possibly upgrades to 10Mbits but even that would surprise me very much...