Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 22:32:55 -0500
From: "Mike B." <yahoo at omniphile.com>
To: wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com, WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: [wsfa-forum] Have some science
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

On 11/12/2013 4:48 PM, Michael Walsh wrote:
> "How ridiculously powerful our computer chips have gotten, in one chart"
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/12/how-ridiculously-fast-our-computer-chips-have-gotten-in-one-chart/
>

Here's the page that chart appears to have come from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Power isn't just a function of transistor count. That's more related to
complexity...and what the chips can do with a cycle.  The power also
involves the clock speed, the instruction set, memory speed and access
delay, the number of processors and how they are linked, etc.

Regardless of that, the current computer generation is freakishly fast.

When I worked for Cray Research in the late 80s the fastest computer on
the planet was the Cray X/MP-48.  It had four processors with a clock
cycle time of 8.5 nanoseconds (about 117 million cycles per second
(Mhz)), and 8 million 64 bit words of memory...and cost about $14
million, not counting the front-end computers, computer room
modifications, etc. It also weighed 5000 lbs, and sucked up 100 Kw of
power.  A carefully coded and optimized Fortran program could get as
much as 890 Mflops (that's millions of floating point operations per
second) from such a machine.

My current desktop is a couple of years old, and has an AMD Phenom II
X4 955 processor with four CPU cores running at 3.2 billion cycles per
second (Ghz), with 8 Gigabytes of RAM...and cost about $1000 to build,
not counting the monitor, keyboard, etc.  Not sure what it weighs, but I
can easily lift it with one hand and it draws about 125 watts.  Tests
have shown it can handle about 50 Gflops (that's billions of floating
point operations per second) or about 56 times faster than that Cray
X/MP-48.

So 56 times the processing power for 1/14,000 the price and 1/100 the
electricity, and about 1/250th the weight (not counting the support
equipment for the Cray, like its motor-generator and cooling system), in
25 years.  You could also fit my entire tower case into just one of the
power supplies of an X/MP-48 (the "seats").  See the Cray here:

http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/cray/xmp.jsp

I presume you know what a full-tower PC looks like.

-- Mike B.