Quote:
Originally posted by Dr Unne
The numbers are misleading at best. There is a physical limit as to how fast current technology can go. Hertz is only a measure of frequency, i.e. how many CPU cycles there are per second. If you have a CPU ticking so fast that the electrical signals don't even have time to physically propagate throughout your circuitry, you're not going to be accomplshing anything.
There's also the question of the ISA (instruction set architecture). It's a common misconception that a 200 MHz CPU is twice as fast as a 100 MHz CPU. In fact the architecture could change so that assembler instructions that used to take 4 clock cycles now takes 6 clock cycles. And if the clock only goes twice as fast as before, that's only 150% increase instead of 200%. There usually is some gain in speed (or why bother producing the new CPUs at all), but pretty much never is the gain in speed proportional to the speed of the processor.
Also consider that computer technology has advanced in highly unpredictable ways throughout history. The computer sitting on my desk right now is more powerful than all the computers in the entire world around 1970 put together. It's possible that we might find some new technology that's so revolutionary that that timeline would actually underestimate things. Who knows.
I wouldn't be surprised, 10 years ago people predicted we wouldn't have 2GHz processors until 2006, yet we've had them for a few years now. The computers used at NASA are much more powerful than anything in the open market, but gold, platinum, and silver are much better conductors than the copper used in most computers today...problem is, they're too expensive. Though there is a physical limit, that limit really applies to the material that's used in the computers. Though gold, silver, and platinum are very expensive...thus they are not used in most computers.