Pointless Announcements

Well, I still have access to the university's Wifi, and it's quite a network. I don't need data on campus or across from campus.

 

Well, if we really want to play that game:

My first PC was an IBM 386 SX 25 with 2 MB RAM. The concept of a dedicated graphics processor didn't exist at the time. My current cell phone has 500 times the amount of RAM, and something over 1000 times the processing power in terms of raw clock cycles. Actual real-world performance will be substantially greater than 1000x the processing power, due to improved instruction sets, greater amounts of on-die cache, etc.

Other devices I own:

My laptop (technically belongs to the company I work for, but is effectively mine as long as I remain employed with them) has a Core I7 2.0 GHz quad-core CPU. It also has 8 GB RAM and two GPUs -- one is an Intel GMA and the other is a Radeon 6490M. The Radeon has 384 MB dedicated RAM and also shares the 8 GB of system RAM. That means it's over 8000 times as powerful as the 386 in terms of raw clock cycles.

My current desktop is using a Core I5 quad-core 3.1GHz CPU. It also has a GTX 670, which is another ~1 GHz CPU. 8 GB of system RAM plus 2 GB dedicated RAM for the 670, and I also have a GTX 460 serving as a dedicated PhysX processor with another 1 GB RAM and ~700 MHz core clock speed. So we're looking at totals around 15 000 times the raw clock cycles, and a level of real-world performance vs the 386 that I don't even dare try to calculate. Even comparing this thing against the first PC that was solely mine is a bit silly -- that was a PIII 450 MHz, so we're still at something like twenty times the raw computing power.

The 386 was brand new about twenty years ago. In those two decades this is the level of advancement we've seen, and I paid less for the brand new desktop than my mother did for the 386 (around half if we're comparing dollar for dollar, substantially less than that if we take inflation into account). Given that, I find it hard to even imagine what things will look like in another decade, let alone another two. As noted in my last post, my cell phone is capable of parsing real-world questions and generating intelligent, context-sensitive responses (this is a big feature of Android 4.1). Ten years ago the idea that I could ask my cell phone a question verbally and get a useful response was silly imaginings. What will we be doing by 2022? Will we be seeing actual artificial intelligence, or something indistinguishable from it?

If the future is now, imagine what things will be like in another few short years.

EDIT: Here's another interesting factoid: recently I've been doing some security auditing for work. That means that I'm currently sitting here in front of my laptop. I have another monitor hooked up to it, and that one is being used to display the VM I'm using to run Backtrack (useful for all manner of tests). So essentially my laptop is currently a computer that's creating another virtual computer, and the second virtual computer is roughly on par with my cell phone, which is more powerful than the PC I owned about 5 years ago.

There are so many layers to this damn thing. I remember when breaking the 1 GHz barrier was exciting. Now I look at a mobile device that weighs just over 100 grams, and I consider it underpowered with that same amount of processing power.

 

No shit. Most days I can't stand to read my drivel either.

 

Bad news - up way too early.

Good news - my brother is at my parents' this weekend, visiting from PA, so I'm heading over there in a couple hours. Haven't seen him since May.