6.05.2004
The effects of Moore's law
There were several articles this week taking a look at the effects of Moores law. For example:
Thirty years with computers
from the article:
Deloitte & Touche Predicts Electronic Game Devices To Increase Five-Fold To 2.6 Billion By 2010
From the article:
Archives
Thirty years with computers
from the article:
- According to Moore's Law, computer power doubles every 18 months, meaning that computers will be a million times more powerful by 2034. According to Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth, connectivity to the home grows by 50 percent per year; by 2034, we'll have 200,000 times more bandwidth. That same year, I'll own a computer that runs at 3PHz CPU speed, has a petabyte (a thousand terabytes) of memory, half an exabyte (a billion gigabytes) of hard disk-equivalent storage and connects to the Internet with a bandwidth of a quarter terabit (a trillion binary digits) per second.
The specifics may vary: Instead of following current Moore's Law trajectories to speed up a single CPU, it's likely that we'll see multiprocessors, smart dust and other ways of getting the equivalent power through a more advanced computer architecture. But users shouldn't have to care about such implementation details.
By 2034, we'll finally get decent computer displays, with a resolution of about 20,000 pixels by 10,000 pixels (as opposed to the miserly 2048 pixels by 1536 pixels on my current monitor). Although welcomed, my predicted improvement factor of 200 here is relatively small; history shows that display technology has the most dismal improvement curve of any computer technology, except possibly batteries.
How could anyone use petabytes of memory and terabits of bandwidth for personal needs? Hard to imagine now, but I don't think we'll have any trouble putting the coming hardware cornucopia to good use. We'll use half the storage space to index all our information so that we can search it instantly. Good riddance, snoozy Outlook search.
We'll also spend a big percentage of the computer power on defence mechanisms such as self-healing software (to root out bugs and adapt to changing environments) and aggressively defensive virus antibodies. We'll need such software to protect against "social engineering" attacks, such as e-mail that purports to come from your boss and asks you to open an attachment.
Computer games in 2034 are likely to offer simulated worlds and interactive storytelling that's more engaging than linear presentations such as those in most movies today. For this new entertainment, the simplest accomplishment we need is artificial actors rendered in real time in high-definition animation. Adapting stories to individual users will be much harder. Once solved, the resulting user interfaces will be much more appealing to a broad market than current computer games, which typically feature convoluted game play and simplified worlds.
Even without full artificial intelligence, computers will exhibit more signs of agency and work to defend their owner's online interests rather than sitting passively, waiting for commands. Richer interaction styles are also likely, both in terms of gestures, physical interfaces, multidevice interfaces and the long-awaited decent high-resolution flat screen.
Certainly, our personal computer will remember anything we've ever seen or done online. A complete HDTV record of every waking hour of your life will consume 2 percent of your hard disk.
Science fiction authors do a better job than I do of speculating on future advances and the implications for human existence. However, one thing is certain: The transition from punched tape to the Web and megapixel displays is merely the first and smallest part of the evolution of user interfaces. If we keep human needs in mind and harness the increased computer power appropriately, there will be great and exciting things ahead in our field.
Deloitte & Touche Predicts Electronic Game Devices To Increase Five-Fold To 2.6 Billion By 2010
From the article:
- Moore's Law implies that there will be an eight-fold increase in processing power and memory capacity between now and 2010, greatly impacting the disruptiveness of the electronic game industry. It is expected that 450 million homes worldwide will have broadband connections by 2010, with one billion individuals having access to multimedia mobile phones that could support game downloads and some form of mobile game playing. Storage capacity will likely increase to 1,000 gigabytes of disk storage in a typical home PC by 2010, enabling games to be longer and more complex with enhanced visual detail, sound effects and music.
These technological advances will create new revenue opportunities for sectors related to electronic games and will expand audience reach beyond the traditional electronic game markets.
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