Chaos Manor Awards 2003, Part 1

By Jerry Pournelle

January 19, 2004

(Chaos Manor Awards 2003, Part 1 :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 282

There were several important developments during 2003, all extensions of previous trends predictable by Moore's Law. Moore's Law, for the newcomers to the computer world, states that computing power doubles every 18 months. It's an empirical observation rather than a law of nature, although there are some underlying physical and economic principles behind it; but it has prevailed for decades now, and looks likely to continue for another six years at least.

The G-5 Supercomputer

One good candidate for the most significant computer development in 2003 was the Apple G-5. Eleven hundred of these dual processor systems were ganged together by Virginia Tech to create the world's third most powerful supercomputer—for a cost of about $5 million, a very low fraction of what the faster machines at NOAA and Los Alamos cost. Large orchids to Apple for this impressive development, and to Mellanox for adapting its InfiniBand 10 Gbps networking hardware to the Mac platform in record time, thus making this supercomputer possible.

Computers on the Commodity Market

Another significant trend was the continuing commoditization of desktop computers, and a trend in that direction among laptops. You can now buy a really powerful computer for a few hundred dollars, and a pretty good laptop for a thousand. Memory is cheap, disk space is cheap, computer speed is cheap, video processing is cheap, and good digital sound is cheap: and all of those will get cheaper.

Confirmation data: I'm writing this from the 2004 Computer Electronics Show, which the taxi drivers say is the largest convention ever held in Las Vegas; whether they are correct or not, it's certainly much larger than the last three COMDEXes.

This commoditization isn't an entirely unmitigated blessing. The trend means that profit margins continue to fall, and companies take radical steps to reduce production costs. That's fine in the consumer products model, where nothing terrible happens if your TV set doesn't work for a day, but our society is increasingly dependent on computers.

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