Want an Idea of How Far Computing Tech Has Come in Just 10 Years?

In 2003, the 8th most powerful super computer ran at just over 6 teraflops. It was owned by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, so who knows how much it cost. Today, if you're willing to plunk down around $11K, you can buy an even more powerful machine.

In 10 years, you're smartphone will probably be that fast.

Will it include better spellchecking?

(Sorry, couldn't resist. The actual point is fascinating, and makes me optimistic and hopeful.)

That's nice. What the internet needs is more (covert) Apple marketing. I'm sure there is no PC in sight that can match the garbage bin's speed for half the price

That aside, impressive progress. IIRC the speed of innovation has slowed somewhat in the past few years, hasn't it. I have been looking at a new computer for some time now and it seems there has been more optimization in terms of power consumption than raw speed.

Well, a GTX Titan graphics cards manages about 1.5 Tflops at a cost of $999, so yeah.

Trying to replicate the low-end Mac Pro using PC based hardware nets you a savings of less than $30. And that's leaving out non-essentials like Thunderbolt ports. You can save more money by ditching things like the SSD drive, but you'd notice a performance hit. I would imagine that if you're going for the very high end Mac Pro, you'd wind up in a similar situation. (I did a quick glance at Dell's website and they have nothing for sale that matches the high end Mac Pro, so you'd have to have the system custom built, if you were going to try and duplicate it on the PC side of things.)

Sort of. The big issue is heat, not power consumption. If chip makers had continued with the standard single core design they'd been using for decades, your PC would require massive amounts of water cooling, or it would hit temps found in nuclear power plants. To combat this, the PC makers started going to multi-core designs, which gives you the effect of a faster single core, without the heat or power consumption demands associated with the design. Of course, if they were to abandon the X86 architecture that they've been using for decades, and switch to that found in modern GPUs, it wouldn't be a problem.

I had looked into a laptop for stationary use after years of not looking at that market at all. Then I found that I don't have to pay for a screen I don't need any more since mini computers are more than capable and give more bang for the buck. So I decided that I want one of the new Intel NUCs. It's good enough for everything I do and I hardly play games any more. As long as I can slay the occasional dragon in the land of Skyrim I'm fine. So, I checked the top model out and lo and behold, it consumes under 40 watts when it's really busy with benchmarks or something.

My four year old full blown PC (Core i7 second generation, some midrange AMD graphics card) gobbles up around 400

I ordered two NUCs. One for desktop and one one will eventually replace my media server, a power suckling beast of a computer. I don't dare venture there yet, however. Never touch a running system, especially when you can't even listen to music when it doesn't work.

Technically speaking all the words in his post are spelled right. No spellchecker would pick up the you're/your problem as that is a wrong word usage situation.

You need a program that can do more then spell checking of words like "spellchecking" and can handle the dreaded your/you're mistake.

^^Um, yeah, it's still called spellchecking if you need a grammar model in order to get the spellchecking right. Word already does this for most cases and probably would pick up this mistake.

Google tests a quantum computer, which didn't even exist 10 years ago.

More at the link.

Who uses Word to post on forums? Is that something Germans do?

And pull the stick out of you're ass. And yes I used the wrong word.

You were going for "pony", right?

I want a pony.

What a coincidence, Lanz, I just had a pony. It was delicious.

You can buy a 64gb microsd card the size of a fingernail for £35. ($58.20 at current rates).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sandisk-Ultra-Class-Micro-Adapter/dp/B0084DWD4Q/ref=sr_1_1/275-0199658-1849836?ie=UTF8&qid=1390503209&sr=8-1&keywords=sd 64gb micro

Even 10 years ago that would be gobsmacking. 20 years ago it would just be a mindfuck. A PC bought in January 1994 would in most cases come with a sub-gigabyte HDD.

A PC from 1994 would be top-end if it had a 500mb hard drive. The iMac I bought in December 2012 has three terabytes of drive space, 1tb of which is solid state. Ten years from now? Exabytes? Zettabytes? More?

Or less at $16.

You expected him to tell you to pull the pony out of your ass?

Being very conservative, Petabytes at the very least.

Zettabytes by 2040 for sure.

I doubt we'll even still measure storage capacity in (x)-bytes by then.

"We", won't. I will.

"My camera gets 10 flinkyplops. ".

"You mean 10 thousand zettabytes. ".

I predict in 10 years, 15 on the outside, that a movie that looks like the first Avengers will be cheap and easy enough to render on a laptop, and be available to Troma.

SyFy movies will still suck, because they'll refuse to hire real writers.

More likely you'd measure it in decimal, as in "Point-zero-zero-one" of a cubic meter of genetic storage. Alternatively, you might call it a meat drive. Yup. That's the next "frontier" of machine storage -- DNA.

Nope. Too clunky and slow. Next up will be quantum storage

Flash memory essentially is that.
Storing in a quantum middle-state in transistors inching towards atom sized.

Quantum sized is a lot smaller than atom sized.

Oh, you mean like vibrating quarks.
Hmm...

Exactly. Plus, since quarks come in multiple "colors", you're not limited to binary 1s and 0s.

Neat idea, but for right now, it takes a lot of brute force to get those little suckers hopping.
There'll probably be a breakthrough though.