Re: Observation about group

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Jeff Blakeney wrote:

>On 14 Dec 2001 21:02:21 GMT, mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon) wrote:
>
>>The hardware capability has increased exponentially, but I did slip
>>a decimal point--the compound annual growth rate is about 60%, so
>>the increase is a factor of 100, not 1000, in ten years.  My error.
>>But we have had twenty years, so the cumulative growth is now
>>a factor of 10,000, or four orders of magnitude.
>
>Well, that still doesn't quite work out because we would have to have
>at least 10 GHz processors now for that to hold true as we have 1 MHz
>processors 20 years ago.  In fact, we had 1 MHz processors in the
>Apple computer in 1977 which was 24 years ago.  :-)

That's because not all the performance improvement is in clock speed.
About an order of magnitude is in parallelism.  For example, a typical
add instruction today adds 32 bits, not 8, and a typical processor does
two adds per cycle.

-michael

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