Let's suppose current medium-spec cellphones have a gigahertz CPU, and that it can do one flop per cycle, peak performance. That's probably a tenth of a flop per cycle at LINPACK, which is how the Top500 list is ranked. So that's a hundred megaflops in your cell phone today, guessing.
This was the first petaflop machine. A petaflop is a million gigaflops, or ten million current cellphones. That's roughly 23 doublings in performance. If Moore's Law were to continue at one doubling per two years, that would be 46 years, or about 2059. Another ten or fifteen years might pass before low-end cellphones have it.
But 46 years is a long time. 46 years ago was 1967. There were no packet-switched computer networks. Nobody had ever seen a video arcade. Computers mostly interacted with people via punched cards, or at best a teletype. The Bloom filter had not yet been discovered. Timesharing and high-level languages were radical, risky concepts; the popular high-level languages of the time were all domain-specific, not general-purpose like C. There was no such thing as a mouse. There were graphical user interfaces and virtual reality. Humans had never walked on the moon.
46 years from now, there may not be cellphones, or humans. We certainly won't still be doubling the density of planar silicon chips every 18 months.
This was the first petaflop machine. A petaflop is a million gigaflops, or ten million current cellphones. That's roughly 23 doublings in performance. If Moore's Law were to continue at one doubling per two years, that would be 46 years, or about 2059. Another ten or fifteen years might pass before low-end cellphones have it.
But 46 years is a long time. 46 years ago was 1967. There were no packet-switched computer networks. Nobody had ever seen a video arcade. Computers mostly interacted with people via punched cards, or at best a teletype. The Bloom filter had not yet been discovered. Timesharing and high-level languages were radical, risky concepts; the popular high-level languages of the time were all domain-specific, not general-purpose like C. There was no such thing as a mouse. There were graphical user interfaces and virtual reality. Humans had never walked on the moon.
46 years from now, there may not be cellphones, or humans. We certainly won't still be doubling the density of planar silicon chips every 18 months.