About an old thread (regarding CPUs)

[Steven81]

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/70488-10-nanotechnology-future

but seriously, iv heard too about nanotechnology , it will change many many things ...

as we laugh today about the time 3 MHZ processors or 1 KB Hard disks were top-notch , i think we'll laugh at the time (the present) we think 3 GHZ or 160 GB HDD are top-notch when nanotechnology hits. but its still easily 5-10+ years away

First off, terribly sorry for "ressurecting" this old as dirt thread, but I find it of considerable interest, especially given how old it is.

Here we lie 11 years since that fact, most of the people who made the posts probably have kids and family (if they were around 20 back then) but we *still* use 3ghz, 160gb PCs. I mean the average laptop probably has even less that 3ghz and if its equipped with ssd probably less than 160 gigs too.

My point is, don't you find it equally depressing how slowed down things got? I remember the old joke that used to say that "in x years our computers would be twice as fast and ten times as bulky". Are we closing to that dystopia or what?

I mean when I was a kid we got from 33mhz to 3.3ghz and now what? We add more cores that some programs *may* use? I tell you fellas, this right here depresses me, so much for the oncoming singularity :-(

 

[gamerk316]

The problem with "speed" is that heat/power draw becomes too big a problem. The assumption back then was the Pentium 4 arch could scale to 10GHz. Today, performance is driven by IPC, not clocks.

Likewise, while 160GB SSD's are common, they are significantly faster then traditional HDD's. And if you need the space, 2TB drives are there for you.

We haven't been slowing down at all; we're just using differnet ways to measure progress.