Reply to post: Re: You do know that Moore’s law says nothing about speed?

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

Bill Stewart

Re: You do know that Moore’s law says nothing about speed?

Moore's Law was originally about the specific technical details and specific time units, but we keep it around because it tells us things we like to hear, and because the economic principal is still sound - there's enough market demand to keep manufacturing improvement and research going so that computers keep getting exponentially better performance, or at least price/performance.

The VAX I used 30 years ago had 50x the RAM of the PDP I used a few years before it, and about every 2 years we could afford double the RAM, so by now $50K that got us 4M RAM will get you 1 million times as much (~$50/4G, and it's >100x faster) and the 1GB of disk was four washing machines for maybe $150K, vs 1TB for $50 now, or 128GB of flash that's generally faster than the RAM on the VAX was.

And the Cray-1 Supercomputer back then? Cell phones have been faster for a long time.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon