Hello dopamine,
Computers have been getting both cheaper and faster for many decades,
which most of us would agree is a good thing. What you can buy now
for a thousand dollars does pretty much the same thing as a
supercomputer of the mid-eighties that cost millions.
The reason behind all this is that there have been constant
improvements in the production of microprocessors. Gordon Moore,
co-founder of Intel, noticed this trend in 1965 and predicted that
processing power would continue to double every 12 months. Things did
slow down a bit though, and this has since been revised to a doubling
time of 18 months. Intel has a nice little bit of propaganda about
this at http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm which
shows the progression in the number of transistors on the processors
since the original 4004 released in 1971, which had 2,250 of them, and
the Pentium 4 with 42,000,000. That's nearly nineteen thousand times
more transistors on a chip!
But this probably can't last forever. The traces on chips (the
actually "wires" that connect the components) are well in to the
sub-micron level, which is about 1/25,000th of an inch. In the not
too distant future these traces will be only a few atoms wide. And
eventually it won't be possible to make them any smaller without
running in to problems of reliability. Then again, engineers are
always working on new technologies that will get around this and allow
ever-faster chips. At least for now Moore's Law is predicted to hold
until around 2007. You can read a bit about this here:
http://www.techtv.com/news/computing/story/0,24195,3331904,00.html
Prices continue to fall because of demand and competition in the chip
sector. People always want faster chips, which drives manufacturers
to keep working on new technologies. Though a chip costs a fortune to
develop it's relatively inexpensive to make each individual one, so
the manufacturers will sell the fastest chips at a high cost to recoup
their development costs, and then reduce prices in order to compete
with other chips on the market and in order to sell to a wider market
segment. The price and performance wars between Intel and AMD over
the last couple of years have been a major benefit to consumers who
have been rewarded with furious competition between the two to develop
faster products and to reduce prices. This could slow, however, since
it seems that AMD is planning to shift it's focus away from PC
processors, which will reduce the level of competition faced by Intel.
There's a good discussion about this at Slashdot here:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/24/0556252&mode=thread&tid=142
One of the areas of focus in chip research right now is on quantum
computing, which promises to massively boost processing power by
making chips work in a whole new way. The details are pretty
complicated, but you can learn about it in a nice article here:
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~westside/quantum-intro.html
I suppose the final answer to your question is that there must, at
some point in the future, be a slowdown in the development of
processor technology. But every time anyone has predicted it, Moore's
Law has continued to rule. At least in the near future I would
suspect that we'll continue to see faster, cheaper computers every
year.
If you want to learn a little more about how a microprocessor works,
you can read about it here:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/microprocessor.htm . Intel also has a
very cool Microprocessor Hall of Fame with information and close-up
photos of many of their processors over the years here:
http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/exhibit/hist_micro/hof/hof_main.htm
I hope this answered your question sufficiently. I tried to avoid
jargon, but if you want more detailed explanations then please let me
know. |
