> For single processor speed, I think that you will find that processor speed
> slightly more than doubled each year until about 2003, but that since then
> there has been very little increase in processor speed. At present, the
> number of processors on a chip has been going up, but that is unlikely to
> last as long as the rapid increase in processor speed did.
Intel has done research on how long they expect to be able to keep
increasing total CPU power. IIRC, their current plans have them
increasing total speed for a surprisingly long period of time. (Like,
IIRC, another 20 years.)
I say total CPU power, as they're very close to the theoretical limits
for a single core. This was the plateau that they hit.
I expect in a time to come there will be full clustering solutions on
a single chip. It will be interesting to see how these are marketted
to the home consumer, and how much bloat the software manufacturers
are willing to add to make the hardware interesting.
My guess: Microsoft will create a new proprietary platform that only
runs on the new hardware. All of their software will then be rewritten
for this new platform. They'll stop supporting the old software and
force business users to upgrade. The new software will be so different
than the old that the business users will want to upgrade their home
computers to the same software/OS. Additionally, all new computers will
only come with the new slightly incompatible software. There will be
new file-formats to take advantage of the new features, and this will
be incompatible with the previous versions. This will make the people
that need to interact with those users need to upgrade. -- Simply
stated: I expect business as usual.
Technology may change focus once we get to a point where rolling
blackouts occur widespread throughout the US. I suspect this is
just a matter of time. It wasn't that long ago in which we thought
the idea of rolling blackouts occuring anywhere in the U.S. was
an absurd idea. Now there's a (relatively) big market for home
generators tied directly in to the wiring and kicking in
automatically.
Cheers,
Steven Black
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