Orders of magnitude
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Good point - that's 2 orders of magnitude accounted for :) But look at transistor counts: 80286: 134,000 i7: 731,000,000 So we could have a single chip containing 5,455 286s! Nick
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or 56230 Z80s
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
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Since it's slow this morning, I thought I'd share something I've been pondering. My first PC had about a 107 byte disk and a clock cycle was about 10-7 seconds. So we as developers had a range of about 14 orders of magnitude to balance - which was pretty impressive even then. Current PC's have 1012 disks and 10-9 processors - a range of 21 orders of magnitude. So in 20 years, the range has increased by 7 orders of magnitude. That's some rate of change! You can also compare the size / Hz ratio. 20 years ago this was about parity, but now we have 103 more data than speed. Since size keeps increasing but clock speeds have topped out, do we need 1000-core processors? I know it's not scientific! I just thought it might be interesting :) Nick
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Nick Butler wrote:
and 10-9 processors
Dang. What's left? The hair on the chiny-chin-chin of the squirrel? Marc
I'm not overthinking the problem, I just felt like I needed a small, unimportant, uninteresting rant! - Martin Hart Turner
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Yes, but we hold the record, across all fields. :)
Hmm... I wonder if the engineers in other fields would agree. Mechanical engineers have to deal with new materials, reliability concerns, and safety issues all the time. Chemical engineering is ever-more complicated by environmental concerns. Electrical engineers are dealing with parts with sub-nanosecond switching times and effects caused by the behavior of countable numbers of electrons.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Nick Butler wrote:
and 10-9 processors
Dang. What's left? The hair on the chiny-chin-chin of the squirrel? Marc
I'm not overthinking the problem, I just felt like I needed a small, unimportant, uninteresting rant! - Martin Hart Turner
Marc Clifton wrote:
Dang. What's left? The hair on the chiny-chin-chin of the squirrel?
Not far off - about 4" at the speed of light :-D Nick
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