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The Continuing Rise of the Machines

Funny things, PCs. My $400 laptop runs circles around my $2300 Sony Vaio (2.8 GHz P4, 1GB RAM) because it is 5 years "younger." Amazing shit. I bought a little USB HDTV ATSC receiver and enjoy beautiful over-the-air HD broadcasts on my laptop... for shits and grins, I plugged it in to my Sony, and it was as if I'd asked it to solve Pi to 3 million decimal places! LOL! It did a decent, albeit, hitchy job of displaying standard definition channels, but HD? Nope.

Ah, Moore's law continues, no longer is it clock cycles, but it will be again, and then it will be architecture change again (multiple cores for now), ad infinitum ... until we accidentally build SkyNet.

I'm guessing in 10 years, a run-of-the-mill PC will have the computational power of some of the "supercomputers" of today. I know, not a stretch. I'm just trying to get my head around the software that will be inevitably written to bog down that much CPU/Memory horsepower, because those damn developers will. I'm looking forward to it.

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  1. Jamie RSunday, December 14, 2008 6:10:00 PM

    What specs is your $400 laptop?

    ReplyDelete
  2. SteveTuesday, December 16, 2008 8:27:00 PM

    The specifications of my laptop are an AMD Turon Dual Core at 2GHz, 3GB RAM, 256MB NVIDEA 8200M, 5400rpm SATA 160GB HD.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jamie RTuesday, December 16, 2008 9:01:00 PM

    You got all that for $400?? How did you manage that?

    ReplyDelete
  4. SteveTuesday, December 16, 2008 10:17:00 PM

    Open Box... and Circuit City, being in Chapter 11, is wheeling and dealing. ;)

    ReplyDelete

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