Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy. This forum is not for asking programming related questions.
Predictions. In what decade/century do you imagine we'll be throwing around terms such as <amount> Terrahertz CPUs and <amount> Exabyte hard disks? It just seems nuts to even think about but I can still remember the days when the 1.44MB (not so) floppy disk was cool
Don't ask why I posted this thread I'm just procrastinating whilst at work.
EDIT | Maybe exabyte was a bit much. How about petabyte?
Last edited by Chris Corbyn on Thu Apr 19, 2007 7:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
But indeed, there'll be a time when we look back and say: "haha, back then people only had like quad-core in their desktops! Now I have that in my iPhone"...
Jenk wrote:Probably faster/sooner than any of us think.
Johnny Mnemonic 1995 -
Johnny: "I've got 320 gig in my head."
Some other dude: "Whoah! I've never heard of that much data in one place before!"
You kidding me? Few months ago I talked with a guy who is like 40-50 years old and he told me he remembered the days when it took a full warehouse to hold a PC with 1GB HD
I think even more important is internet connection speed. I think it is still lower than it SHOULD be. I have 16 mbs cable here (I'm lucky that I actually pull 15 mbs)... but that isn't fast enough for what the world wants right now.
I would love to watch full resolution HD footage (and I'm not talking about compressed Apple Quicktimes) on my computer... maybe even live, without having to wait for it to download.
When everyone can watch full HD TV on your computer without waiting... that'll be the day.
I'm no expert on this subject but aren't processors limited (per core) in how fast they can go because of how to silicone is manufactured? I'm sure I read/heard that to get more out of a single silicone chip you'd have to take it into space because of pressure or something.
So yeah I agree that hard drives will advance faster than processors, because as mentioned in another current thread, the file systems are always getting better and there's no limit on the amount of platters you can put in a hard drive. Also, if you look at hard drive based MP3 players and laptops, they pretty much double the amount of storage in a given space every few years. I read someone has recently manufactured a 100GB hard drive that would fit in a current iPod. That's a big difference from just a couple of years ago when 60GB in an MP3 player was amazing.
Also the recent advances of removeable storage show that there's alot more to come data storage wise in the next few decades.
Yeah I actually wondered if I needed an e on the end or not, but thought they were the same spelling. I got my back with the "I'm no expert" phrase preceeding my statement though
I think even more important is internet connection speed. I think it is still lower than it SHOULD be. I have 16 mbs cable here (I'm lucky that I actually pull 15 mbs)... but that isn't fast enough for what the world wants right now.
I agree, I live in Ireland with a monopoly telecom that's been bought twice and incurred massive debt from both. Needless to say even installing a basic broadband scheme in rural areas (urban cities and large towns have typically good broadband) is not a priority for them - I still, after all these years, am forced to use either dial up or a dodgy (but being upgraded next month!!!) wireless radio connection. Imagine living in 1995 and you have a good idea what my internet experience from home is like... Well, it's finally being upgraded - to 3mbs...
There are days being Irish is actually sort of sad...
I'm no expert on this subject but aren't processors limited (per core) in how fast they can go because of how to silicone is manufactured? I'm sure I read/heard that to get more out of a single silicone chip you'd have to take it into space because of pressure or something.
There's a soft limit on silicon chips. Silicon itself has a limit you can't get past, but there are other means of increasing speed by introducing novel materials. IBM and Intel have had successes in that area. There are other methods of melding cores which can also help expand multi-core limits - multi-core processing today is barely out of its infancy. Just compare the Intel/AMD quad-core designs and it's easy to see the level of improvements possible after just one iteration since dual-cores arrived.
I doubt the silicon limit will have too much impact on Moore's Law - lots of ways to skin this cat.
Jenk wrote:Probably faster/sooner than any of us think.
Johnny Mnemonic 1995 -
Johnny: "I've got 320 gig in my head."
Some other dude: "Whoah! I've never heard of that much data in one place before!"
You kidding me? Few months ago I talked with a guy who is like 40-50 years old and he told me he remembered the days when it took a full warehouse to hold a PC with 1GB HD
It's only 10 years ago 500mb HD's were considered "Massive". Nowadays, 500gb is pretty much shrugged at.
Prices in the last 15 years have gone from £10/1MB to about £0.50/1GB.
I've worked with some seriously ancient hardware.. 640K RAM pack that's about the size of a kitchen sink. 1.5GHz CPU's (Entire standalone units for mainframe) the size of a telephone booth. Hell.. Digital Watches today have more computation power than what the entire NASA had for the 1969 moon landing.