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Having lived in azn land for about a year now one thing can be said: the computing power is the same here as it is in any other developed metropolis. Yes, I know you’ve seen live-action movies and even some anime that suggests these time zones are super special, but the Pentiums work the same here as they do in San Diego and London.

And since I’m so bad at predictions I thought I’d make one regarding gizmos.

This is a 10 year prediction. That a ATX-sized desktop will consume the same amount of power yet be able to compute 10 teraflops (double precision) of combined general-computing (CPU + GPU); furthermore, the form factor will also hold a 20 TB SSD running at SATA 3.0 transfer rates. The system will include at least 128 gigabytes of memory running at GDDR 5 equivalent speeds/timings (this assumes that the GPU has moved to the same package as the CPU). As far as networking, the desktop will have a 100 GB ethernet female connector.

And for the record, I’m not pulling a Kurzweil because he likes to accelerate things.

For instance, looking back 10 years ago the fastest mainstream workstation you could put together included:

Two Pentinum II’s at 450 mhz. Because these did not have any of the cool SIMDs from the SSE family (MMX doesn’t really count), the dual-CPU solution is only able to achieve a maximum theoretical 900 megaflops. 1 flop per cycle, times two cores.

Fast forward to today, for the same price (actually less when adjusted for inflation) you can put together a dual socket solution that includes 8 cores altogether. Eight 3.2 ghz Penryn cores will clock in at around 40 gigaflops.

Nevermind the jump in bus transfer rates (at least a 16x improvement) or the increased bandwidth in system RAM (100 mhz SDRAM has a bandwidth of 6.4 Gbit/s versus DDR3 1600 which pumps through 204.8 Gbit/s).

The modern day professional workstation also boasts multiple GPUs from nVidia and ATI. The new 280 and 4780 purportedly compute at around 1 teraFLOPS (the 280 is just under that, the 4780 is just over it). The penalty for double-precision calculations is about 60%. Oh, and you can string 4 of these bad boys together as seen in the University of Antwerp FASTRA.

10 years ago the best thing you could buy off the shelf was a 12 MB Voodoo2. It’s difficult to really gauge just how many FLOPS it could perform (primarily because the pipeline was non-programmable unlike modern GPGPUs), but lets be nice and say its 90 mhz core could pump out 90 megaFLOPS. In SLI mode you could put a max of two together.

So 180 megaFLOPS versus 4 teraFLOPS. You also realize that we’ve skipped over the entire giga range, right?

While it could be argued that it costs a considerably more amount of money to put together a quad-GPU system (around $2000 or so), the performance differential on this one metric alone is around 20,000x.

That’s huge, especially since a Voodoo-based solution still required a 2D card of some sort. Remember, this is May 1998 we’re talking about — the original TNT didn’t come out till the end of that summer. In fact, it was that fall that my friends and I each built the venerable Celeron/BH6 overclock combo.

Anyways, while Kurzweil likes to turn technology into an exponentially growing curve, I would like to take the more conservative approach and simply multiply the best consumer tech of today by the differentials based on the 10 previous years.

The typical hard drive back then was around 20 gig (mine was a mere 6.4 in October 1998). It cruised without a buffer and could transfer at bursts of 33 MB/s.

Today you can grab a SATA-based 1 TB drive with a 16 MB buffer with bursts at around 300 MB/s.

While regulatory agencies can screw up wireless development, ten years ago 802.11 allowed you to surf the interweb at a blistering 2 mbit/s. Today 802.11n put some MIMO engines under the hood allowing you to theoretically hit 248 mbit/s.

I’ll be honest and say I doubt that there will be a 100x fold increase in wireless bandwidth for the same 100m range, but I wouldn’t put 10-20 out of the question (just look at Bluetooth 3.0 and Wireless USB rates of 480 mbits and 2.5 gbit/s).

So, if you carry the 7 and factor the 3 you get the following for May 2018:

Single-precision CPU: 900 megaFLOPS to 40 gigaFLOPS turns into 44x. So around 1.75 teraFLOPS a decade from now.

Single-precision GPU: 180 megaFLOPS to 4 teraFLOPS turns into 22222x. So approximately a gajillion FLOPS. I do not think this scaling will occur (it would turn into 88 exaFLOPS which is a tad unrealistic). A single-digit petaFLOPS range might not be out of the question…

System RAM: 512 MB single-channel SDRAM to 16 GB dual-channel DDR3 turns into a gain of 32x. That gain in a decade is almost believable if designers fully merge the GPU onto the same package with the CPU (and thus pooling the memory together). So around 512 GB of memory.

Hard drive: Two 20 GB to two 1 TB drives turns into 50x. This is only limited by the ability to fabricate logic gates smaller (Intel just announced the construction of a 32 Gb NAND module at a 34 nm process which can help them slap a bunch of these in a standard 2.5″ form factor). Who knows what kind of other storage medium will be used at that time (holographic?). And this is becoming increasingly less important with cloud storage and large removable drives.

Soundcard: back in the day you wanted to grab a Creative-based 3D positioning card or something with that hyped Aureal chip. With Vista, it can all be done with software, so you really don’t even need the latest X-Fi and I doubt that in 10 years this will be much of a retail market.

Physics: didn’t exist 10 years ago. Ageia was bought out by nVidia and based on every report about the upcoming 280 and 4870 the PPU has moved entirely back onto the main card. DirectX 11 is supposed to natively add physics routines to the shaders as well. I don’t think the PPU will leave the card GPU ten years from now.

Networking: as I mentioned above, wireless could easily jump another factor of 10-20. Wired lines in 1998 were still stuck at 100 Mbit/s. I remember the day in highschool when a guy from a large CAT-wire company showed up and talked about their copper-based gigabit solution. I laughed and thought fiber would rule the day. This of course hasn’t taken place as there are numerous 10 Gb copper solutions for blade servers and workstations. I’d like to think that in 10 years we’ll have moved onto fiber 100 Gb ethernet connections, perhaps even terabit if someone can miniaturize the multiplexing mirrors effectively (right now those intercontinental speeds you hear about in the news are dozens of 10 and 100 Gb streams combined into one).

Of course, all of this could be for naught if software doesn’t scale with the hardware. Perhaps Windows 9 will be out. Maybe most of our gadgets will really just be thin clients connected to the cloud (though I doubt hard core gamers, graphic artists or CAD specialists would be able to go that route).

For the typical consumer, barring the apocalypse, I will predict that engineers will be able to cram the most powerful consumer workstation today into a iPhone-like form factor in 2018. I don’t think that is too unfathomable considering I am a super duper expert on “room at the bottom.”

Actually, in six more months my prediction will look more realistic because a dual-socket octo Nehalem solution will run 16 physical cores (plus another 16-”virtual” ones through Hyperthreading) each of which are more powerful than the Penryn versions. Larrabee and other discrete GPGPUs will continue to develop at their fast paced rates.

The only thing that probably won’t develop at such drastic rates will be the landscape here in azn land. Japan, Korea or Taiwan won’t have any floating buildings or flying cars. Of course China will, because it will become the hyped tech landmass of the future once they fix that nasty pollution problem.

See also:
What a difference 36 years make
GPU versatility
Seth Lloyd’s Million Megahertz CPU
What is wrong with Moore’s Law?
Specialization, Centralization, and the Future of Chip Integration
What do Botnets and GPGPUs have in common?
Intel Has a Small Urethra
FLOPS, MIPS, Watts and the Human Brain
10 years later, where are they now?

A Frenchmen is apparently trying to break the record for the fastest free-fall as well as the highest free-fall (both records have held since 1960).

Towards the end of the MSNBC report it is noted that:

He got started after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986 — with some of the astronauts surviving in high altitudes only to die at splashdown.

The problem with this is that as the article discusses the guy has to wear a pressure suit in order to survive the 130,000 foot drop.

The crew of the Challenger were ejected at around 64,000 feet. Based on evidence from the debris it appears that several emergency air packs were found and a couple had been used. However, as the cabin of the shuttle was depressurizing, they would have still passed out and subjected to the harsh cold temperature (just like cabin blowouts on a jumbojet and the subsequent freezing wind rip the skin off of people sitting near the hole and send them into shock). And to make matters worse, they would have crashed into the sea at around 200 g’s.

So no, the entire crew needed to wear pressure suits in addition to parachutes in order to survive the splashdown.

Courtesy of the latest skinny on Google’s mammoth datacenters.

Regarding their infrastructure my favorite quote continues to be: “Server makers pride themselves on their high-end machines’ ability to withstand failures, but Google prefers to invest its money in fault-tolerant software.”

And in the long run, that probably will be their greatest competitive advantage.

If you’re interested in scifi/cyberpunk films and are tolerant of Japanese style animation you may be interested in Ghost in the Shell, specifically Innocence. Your inner singulitarian will be satiated.

Note: if you watch the first movie your wife might not approve of the nonsensical nudity in a couple of scenes (it really doesn’t make much sense, just an excuse to draw cartoon cleavage I suppose).

You don’t have to worry about standing in line to see some people get punched in the crotch by Steven Seagal. Somehow the writers at The Onion managed to convince a studio to put together a straight-to-DVD movie filled with their antics.

The funny part for me is that someone named Caroon Gharakhanian actually emailed me saying that he saw various posts of The Onion on my site and thought I’d be interested in the movie. Pretty smart viral marketing (using a bot to find out the millions of sites that link to even one article and then filtering for the correct email… innovative operation).

That reminds me of when Tyler Cowen released his new book. He emailed everyone that had ever posted a comment on Marginal Revolution to tell us about it.

And speaking of books, War Nerd, one of my favorite writers has a new book coming out on July 1 (apparently you can get an advanced copy at Amazon).

Note: no I wasn’t paid by anyone to post this. Yes, I would like to have been paid. Send yen, loonies or euros to me Seoul. No dollars.

Number 10: the Bridges of Madison County

Clint Eastwood basically betrayed America by making this movie. I don’t want to talk about it.

That is from a recent compilation of the worst 20 chick flicks of all time.

Unfortunately various girlfriends have dragged me along at some point to most of them. God I hate Richard Gere. Any Baldwin brother. And worst of all: Ben Affleck.

Oh who am I kidding, I scour torrent sites to find the best DVD rip of these emotionally heartening movies and watch them by myself.

Be sure to watch this funny recut of Sleepless in Seattle:

Over the past year or so I’ve argued that a better gauge for measuring processor performance is through metrics like the SPEC suite. Furthermore, I’ve mentioned that watts should also be increasingly taken into account (e.g., MIPS/Watt, FLOPS/Watt).

I have also discussed the emerging trend of packing systems into every denser proximities — even noting that IBM has modeled these details in a program called Project Kittyhawk.

The above screenshot is an image from a spiffy new datacenter firm based out of Las Vegas. The thing that caught my eye was the watt per sq. foot density.

While I am hardly the expert on this matter I am curious to know what Google and IBM are range their systems are balanced around. While their numbers may be a bit different, one should also take into consideration that firms like Google typically install OTS white-boxes whereas IBM is all about custom tailored server cabinets (designing every little divet and screw).

My bet is that SuperNAP (Switch Communications) is a boutique shop somewhere in between: OTS technology that is entirely homogeneous. A bit different than RackSpace for sure, but I bet the players will consolidate within the next decade bringing about those digital factories in the clouds.

I am curious to know what energy source is providing them electricity. Perhaps they are a new owner of solar tracking photovoltaic farm. After all, Las Vegas – like much of the southwest – gets a lot of solar radiation each year.

See also: Turning the Moon into a Black Body Object

Via The Register

This confuses me, in a good way:

It appears that Microsoft Research has yet another hit on their hands.

You may also be interested in peer-to-peer game technology from MSR called Donnybrook which allows a normal server to host hundreds of players simultaneously without crashing.

When I first arrived in Korea last summer I saw a number of advertisements for a big budget scifi thriller called D-War. I asked my students about it and they all said it sucked a big one — that Transformers was much better.

I finally had a chance to watch it and it sucked a big one. Not only was the dialogue absolutely cliche but the editing was incredibly choppy. Scenes were not allowed to finish before the next one began. If you have seen the horrendous Dungeon Siege by Uwe Boll then you know just how bad editing can be. My understanding is that on emergency occasions a studio might bring in an outsider to help fix this kind of problem. For instance, Francis Ford Coppola was brought in to salvage the remains of another bomb, Supernova. Should’ve hired someone for this mess.

Anyways, a couple more nitpicks. The main boss guy reminded me of the cheesy bosses from the live-action Ninja Turtle movies or from any episode of Power Rangers. There was also a good 10 minutes of Korean dialogue that I could hardly follow and seeing as it had a worldwide release it would have been nice to see some kind of subtitles, even en espanol!

Craig Robinson, the black guy, never had a clearly defined role. Not only was he a computer whiz with access to a detailed NSA database of every person in LA region, but he was also was a camera man, amateur detective and also had the authority to order and use a company helicopter. The thing that bugged me most about him: his laptop was never plugged in to a power adapter or wired LAN-line at work.

Oh, and the two main actors definitely didn’t look like they were in college, let alone late teens. It is the same problem that many films and shows staring young adults continues to have. Remember Dawson’s Creek or Smallville? Did any of those actors look like they were remotely the characters age? [Note: the lead male is actually 35 and the girl is 26]

And perhaps the biggest annoyance of all was that the scenery did not match the geography of the region. This is the same problem I mentioned with Transformers… where is that huge city the robots fought in? In D-War apparently dragons and dinosaurs are apparently able to run around without being spotted and the super evil boss dude was able to build a couple of huge statues and monuments in the middle of a field. That kind of stuff never attracts attention, right?

1 out of 5. The only redeeming part of the film were the computer graphics/special effects but even those became tiresome. The same thing can be said for Doom another movie I recently watched and which blew chunks.

I’m sure there are a dozen of boutique proprietary software solutions for drawing physics collisions but this is one of the more detailed ones that I have seen of late: