Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
Well, yes "The power of computer chips is increasing at an exponential rate"; but not "prices continue to crash". A high end PC costs the same today as it did in 1985. Around $1000 would get you a state of the art PC AT clone then, and it will get you a high end quad core processer with a TByte drive and 8 GB of RAM today.
It's just that a high end PC is very much higher end than it was in 1985. Actually the prices are decreasing, but only in terms of the dollar not being worth as much today as it was then.
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The price per transistor on a chip really has crashed; what you get for $1,000 today isn't just an improvement, it's orders of magnitude more than what you got in 1985. And don't discount the forces of inflation, the real prices of computers have gone down significantly compared to the average Westerner's real income.
Those increases in transistor density, married to falling costs, haven't just made desktops better either. They've made modern cellphones and entire other branches of technology possible, which by the standards of 1985 would be computational wonders.
Just like finding the forest when you're surrounded by a bunch of dumb trees, it's hard to see the revolution when you're in it, and the computer revolution never ended.
Quote:
Originally Posted by toddos
Just because Moore's Law has theoretically topped for CPUs out doesn't mean there's nowhere else to go. |
There's still plenty of room at the bottom as far as CPUs go.
Particularly with the recent creation of atom-sized transistors.