[extropy-chat] more moore

[Emlyn]

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 08:36:31 +0200, Max M <maxm at mail.tele.dk> wrote:
> Spike wrote:
> 
> >Wooohooo!  The party is not over!  {8-]  s
> >
> 
> They might possibly be able to produce more power full chips. But will
> there still be a reason to buy them?
> 
> My motherboard recently came to a halt, and I had to choose whether if I
> should upgrade the entire machine, or just the motherboard.
> 
> I choose the motherboard only solution, as my 1.2 GHz machine is already
> plenty fast for my needs.
> 
> I can watch and edit video at professional quality, compose music, play
> a few games and generally do what I need to. So why should I buy a
> faster chip at a higher price?
> 
> Generally I believe there is natural technological plateau for most of
> the current technological tasks.
> 
>    bussines (text editing/spreadsheets) -> music -> video -> vr games etc.
> 
> Bussines computers have already been fast enough for a while for typical
> use. We will soon have chips at a level where all current tasks can be
> done on a cheap system. Why then bother to pay more?
> 
> I think that new technology is needed before there will be a great need
> for much faster computers.
> 
> regards Max M Rasmussen, Denmark
> 


I agree that we are at the boundary for a lot of current tasks. I
believe we are more than capable of using more processor speed, but we
have a newish bottleneck, which is bandwidth.

When we can have a couple more orders of magnitude of (low latency)
bandwidth we'll be able to see very different applications (video
things? Dunno, anyone?), which will result in our machines being
flooded relatively constantly with vast amounts of data. Then we'll
have a need for bigger processors to cope with the flood.

Currently I more than use the (big) processors I have, but that's
because I use VMWare virtual machines extensively to simulate
corporate networks on my dev box. There are always new & useful ways
to waste excess resources and solve previously thorny problems.

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *