Robotic Nation Evidence

It was just last week that Microsoft started talking about "dual-core" processors in 2006, and already Intel has made it official:

Intel changes plans, focuses on 'dual-core' chips

If you look at this presentation from Intel, Intel is predicting something like 1.8 billion transistors running at 30 GHZ by 2010. With 1.8 billion transistors, you could put 14 of the latest, greatest Prescott CPUs on a single chip. 30 GHz is about 10 times faster than today's chips. So that is a potential 140x speed improvement over the next six years.

And there are other avenues to high-speed CPUs as well. For example, this paper was featured on Slashdot. It shows how the inexpensive graphics processors found in most PCs today actually have an incredible amount of general-purpose computing power on tap. For certain types of problems, the GPU can be three times faster than the CPU. Once we start creating custom vision processors, custom knowledge processors, etc., things will rapidly accelerate on the robotic hardware front.