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Maybe, though I am concerned about processing power stagnating. Advancement is governed by economics as well as technical capability. There must be demand for

by api 16y ago

Maybe, though I am concerned about processing power stagnating. Advancement is governed by economics as well as technical capability. There must be demand for new technology, or a field stagnates. Witness aviation as an example... utterly stagnant outside of military niche applications. People seem to no longer want faster and faster computers, and the market seems to be moving toward lighter-weight lower-power portable devices like netbooks, the iPad, etc. Those have slower CPUs than current-generation desktops. I suppose the extreme gamer and server/datacenter markets are still driving performance, but for how long? One problem is that programmers are not using the capabilities of current-generation processors, partly because the dominant OS (cough Windows cough) makes it horrifically painful to deploy desktop apps. This drives all development to the web and turns desktops into thin clients. In the end this kills demand for performance outside the datacenter market.

troystribling 16y ago
You are correct for consumer electronics. But commercial and scientific computing are driving increases computational power and density that do not seem to be letting up. In the 4 years I have worked in hosting the amount of server you can get in a 4u box has gone from 8 2.5GHz cores to 24 2.5GHz cores and from 32GB to 256GB. The storage requirements and compute requirements for applications are also increasing substantially.
werrett 16y ago
You're confounding peoples preference for usability (including portability) with a preference for applications with low computational demands. If you could pack the "extreme gamer" capabilities of a Playstation or an Xbox into a format as "usable"[1] as an iPad... Then you would of engineered the next iPad. The iPad was able to come into existence because we've finally hit the point where we can cram that much computation into a small factor form (along with all the other engineering advances like wireless networking, reducing power consumption, improving display and improving battery life). Most of those advances are directly descended from the pushing of the bleeding edge. Companies / people are not simply going to go "oh we've got iPads now. So no need to make anything faster / better / bigger". [1] By usable I'm not talking about some magical Jobsian property of the device. I'm not even talking about the software interface. I'm talking about being able to surf the web / post to your blog / whatever while on the toilet. Try doing THAT in 1995.

by api 16y ago

troystribling 16y ago

You are correct for consumer electronics. But commercial and scientific computing are driving increases computational power and density that do not seem to be letting up. In the 4 years I have worked in hosting the amount of server you can get in a 4u box has gone from 8 2.5GHz cores to 24 2.5GHz cores and from 32GB to 256GB. The storage requirements and compute requirements for applications are also increasing substantially.

werrett 16y ago

You're confounding peoples preference for usability (including portability) with a preference for applications with low computational demands. If you could pack the "extreme gamer" capabilities of a Playstation or an Xbox into a format as "usable"[1] as an iPad... Then you would of engineered the next iPad. The iPad was able to come into existence because we've finally hit the point where we can cram that much computation into a small factor form (along with all the other engineering advances like wireless networking, reducing power consumption, improving display and improving battery life). Most of those advances are directly descended from the pushing of the bleeding edge. Companies / people are not simply going to go "oh we've got iPads now. So no need to make anything faster / better / bigger". [1] By usable I'm not talking about some magical Jobsian property of the device. I'm not even talking about the software interface. I'm talking about being able to surf the web / post to your blog / whatever while on the toilet. Try doing THAT in 1995.