Robotic Nation Evidence

Every year, Maximum PC magazine puts together its "Dream Machine". It's the most powerful PC that you can build with off-the-shelf components. This year's machine has quite impressive specs, including:

• Dual processor motherboard holding two dual core chips (AMD Opteron 275s). Each chip has 233 million transistors and runs at 2.2 GHz.
  
• 8 GB of RAM
  
• Two nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards, with 300 million transistors each.
  
• 2 TB of disk space implemented using five Hitachi 500 GB drives in a RAID 3 array.

Over a billion transistors in all. The machine costs almost $13,000 when you include the case, power supply, dual monitors and speakers.

You read the article and you think, "My God, this is an insane amount of computing power and disk space! Who could possibly need such a machine?!" But then you look back at the first Dream Machine that they built in 1996. That machine had:

• A screaming 200 MHz Pentium 1
  
• 32 MB of RAM
  
• A 2 GB hard disk.

They didn't even have a "3D graphics card" in it, because 3D graphics cards didn't exist yet.

Just 9 years ago that was an insanely expensive ass-kicking machine. Today this 9-year-old Dream Macine is so pathetic that it would be unusable. 32 MB of RAM??? You could not even launch the OS in that.

Even coming up to the year 2000 Dream Machine, you find:

• Dual Pentium IIIs at 1 GHZ
  
• 512 MB RAM
  
• 75 GB hard drive

That cost $12,000. $12,000! Today a $500 desktop PC at Best Buy beats that.

So... Between 1996 and 2005 -- just 9 years -- disk space increased by a factor of 1,000. RAM increased by a factor of 250. CPU clock speed increased by a factor of 11, there are 4 cores instead of 1 and the number of transistors went up by a factor of 150. And now we have incredibly powerful graphics cards holding 300 million transistors -- a technology that did not even exist 9 years ago in the normal PC marketplace.

Project out 10 years from now, to 2015. It is quite likely that the $13,000 "Dream Machine" of 2005 will seem pathetic and unusable. You won't even be able to buy a machine like this because it is so pathetic. The 2015 Dream Machine will have:

• 2 petabytes of disk space.
  
• 2 terabytes of RAM.
  
• 65 billion transistors in the CPUs. They will be clocked at 25 GHz and there will be 16 cores (or maybe there will be 200 cores clocked at 5 GHz).

Who knows what the graphics cards in 2015 will be doing.

Will the machine in 2015 contain a vision processing card??? That is the huge question I have. 3D graphics accelerator cards like we see today did not even exist in 1996 as far as the Dream Machine was concerned. Will we see vision processing cards arise from nothing and explode in power like that? Or will it take ten years more?

What will the robots in 2015 be able to do?

And what will the Dream Machines in 2025 look like? I don't think we can imagine it.

See Robotic Nation and Robots in 2015 for a discussion.