Just to show that Moore’s Law hasn’t yet reached its limit, a California-based company called ClearSpeed Technologies is to unveil a new microprocessor that, a spokesperson told reporters at Wired News, “has the potential to bring supercomputer performance to the desktop.”
Okay, so you need to put 24 of these chips into a single machine, but that’s entirely possible, and a laptop with 24 microprocessors (arranged on six PCI cards) would still be a snip, at around $25,000.
“That’s not cheap!” I hear you shout.
For a PC, it isn’t. But for a supercomputer, it is. And a PC that contains 24 of ClearSpeed’s CS301 chips would be powerful enough to enter the current list of the world’s 500 top supercomputers.
“By comparison, most of the supercomputers on the Top 500 list are clusters of hundreds of processors and cost millions of dollars.
The most powerful supercomputer in the world, Japan's Earth Simulator, operates at about 35 teraflops, consumes a warehouse-size space and cost $350 million.”
But who would need a “laptop supercomputer,” other than guys who like to show off their gadgets?
Lots of people apparently, particulary those working in Hollywood computer graphics industry.
Comments
2 comments
I think the average PC already has enough power to cater for people's needs. Having said that I guess if they found a killer application to run on it, then everyone would upgrade.
I'm thinking specifically here of how when Microsoft introduced Windows 3.x people upgraded their machines from 386s to 486s so that they could run Win applications faster.
Phil: yes, I agree. In fact, there has since been a saturation of the PC market,which started around the time of the Pentium II ... there haven't really been many killer apps that require upgrading since then.
If anything, the tail has been wagging the dog for the last few years -- i.e. software designers are tending to create web applications more and more, and thus they're having to take into account the fact that users may not have the latest browsers, latest operating systems, etc., so they're taking care to make their applications backward compatible, in this sense.
Plus, the as-yet slow speed of access means that manufacturers haven't been able to push "fat" web applications at us. They've been forced to keep their products slim and streamlined. :)