Re: Re: the future is bright
Originally posted by Wonder Boy
thats what they said all those years ago about 60mgz and 120k computers...
I think that we do have to acknowledge that there are different markets for computing power, and that while we do know that there will always be a market for the utmost processing power, that general consumers way well cease to be a part of that market.
I think that general users may have an interest in real-time encoding of DVDs, which will lead to further processing demands when we go to HD-DVD, but I don't see the media companies going beyond HDTV for several decades. Tthink how many decades it's taken for HDTV to come, and it's not even pervasive yet. So that means we'll need more than 5X the computing power, that we currently have, available at consumer price points, maning we will need almost 10X the computing power available to the consumer, prosumer and workstation markets. That would mean running at 20GHz, or dual 10GHz, or quad 5Ghz. That would mean, according to Moore's Law, we would reach a significant consumer drop-off point between 2005-2008. Since IBM might not keep up with Moore's Law for the processors it provides to Apple, that schedule might slip to 2009.
Try to remember I'm only talking about consumers, not professional. I expect a combination of a continuous drop-off in demand, with a refocussing on making parts cheaper, more reliable, more portable, and better able to interface with external systems. These external systems might include faster storage, new wireless technologies, or even things like direct access to our brains. Whatever. That might push the schedule for a few more years. None-the-less, by 2015 the consumer market will no longer be pushing innovation, and thus innovation will receive less financing, and so will slow. Further advancement will return to the area of big companies, militaries, etc.
I know based this all on video encoding, but I believe that that one demand is representative of consumer demand for CPU processing, in general. Ie, a game or word-processor need not be that fast, in general.
Just look at other industries, like flight, where early developments were involved with the military, then the consumer market pushed developments for a while, and then the majority of development returned to the folds of the military, once consumer cost/benefit objectives had been met. Of course we'll probably all be flying supersonic ten years from now, but that just supports my point that progress continues, it just doesn't trickle down quickly to the consumer area, after consumer markets aren't the primary focus.
This is all very good for Apple, since they already focus on other issues than raw speed. One might argue that once computers can process everything we'd need them to, then maybe we'll have a chance of them beginning to do what we actually need them to do - suck less.
