The Future of Computing
Mar. 31st, 2004 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fishsupremeBill Gates says:
Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free -- but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the network will not be a limiting factor," Gates said, referring to networked computers and advances in the speed of the Internet.
The world's largest software maker is betting that advances in hardware and computing will make it possible for computers to interact with people via speech and that computers which can recognize handwriting will become as ubiquitous as Microsoft's Windows operating system, which runs on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers.
"Many of the holy grails of computing that have been worked on over the last 30 years will be solved within this 10-year period, with speech being in every device and having a device that's like a tablet that you just carry around," Gates said at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo, held by information technology researcher Gartner Group.
Via understands it. Bill Gates actually gets it. Intel, with their new move to Pentium M and relabeling processors with model numbers instead of clock speeds, is starting to get it.
We've reached the point where "More power!" is not what most computing users want. Sure, we (the kind of geeks who read the AnandTech forums, where I found the link ot this article) still want it... but your average computer buyer does not. We've reached the end of more, faster, better -- and are now at the beginning of smaller, cheaper, and good enough.
In 10 years, super-powered enthusiast systems will be around... but their price will have gone *up* from where they are now, not down. The vast majority of people will be using systems not that much more powerful than what we use now... that they bought for under $100 and that fit in a desk drawer.
Intel's latest CPU (Pentium IV Prescott) is a disaster. It puts out enough heat to fry an egg on, and isn't much faster than what they already had. The higher they clock their CPUs, the harder it gets to ramp up more -- they're seeing diminishing returns. They can either keep throwing themselves into that wall, or recognize that most people don't want to go faster anyway; they want a computer that costs less, takes up less space, and is cheaper. They'd like it to be easier to use, too, but that's more a software than a hardware issue.
I think that future high-end CPUs will not be faster so much as more parallel -- one physical CPU will be multicored, and contain 4 or 8 or 16 logical CPUs inside it, all capable of processing simultaneously. This will be even better for software written to make use of it, but will not benefit traditional software at all... but current CPUs are already plenty fast for traditional software.
Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free -- but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the network will not be a limiting factor," Gates said, referring to networked computers and advances in the speed of the Internet.
The world's largest software maker is betting that advances in hardware and computing will make it possible for computers to interact with people via speech and that computers which can recognize handwriting will become as ubiquitous as Microsoft's Windows operating system, which runs on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers.
"Many of the holy grails of computing that have been worked on over the last 30 years will be solved within this 10-year period, with speech being in every device and having a device that's like a tablet that you just carry around," Gates said at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo, held by information technology researcher Gartner Group.
Via understands it. Bill Gates actually gets it. Intel, with their new move to Pentium M and relabeling processors with model numbers instead of clock speeds, is starting to get it.
We've reached the point where "More power!" is not what most computing users want. Sure, we (the kind of geeks who read the AnandTech forums, where I found the link ot this article) still want it... but your average computer buyer does not. We've reached the end of more, faster, better -- and are now at the beginning of smaller, cheaper, and good enough.
In 10 years, super-powered enthusiast systems will be around... but their price will have gone *up* from where they are now, not down. The vast majority of people will be using systems not that much more powerful than what we use now... that they bought for under $100 and that fit in a desk drawer.
Intel's latest CPU (Pentium IV Prescott) is a disaster. It puts out enough heat to fry an egg on, and isn't much faster than what they already had. The higher they clock their CPUs, the harder it gets to ramp up more -- they're seeing diminishing returns. They can either keep throwing themselves into that wall, or recognize that most people don't want to go faster anyway; they want a computer that costs less, takes up less space, and is cheaper. They'd like it to be easier to use, too, but that's more a software than a hardware issue.
I think that future high-end CPUs will not be faster so much as more parallel -- one physical CPU will be multicored, and contain 4 or 8 or 16 logical CPUs inside it, all capable of processing simultaneously. This will be even better for software written to make use of it, but will not benefit traditional software at all... but current CPUs are already plenty fast for traditional software.
