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Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
An anonymous reader writes "Based on decades of growth in CPU speeds, Santa was supposed to drop off my 10 Ghz PC a few weeks back, but all I got was this lousy 2 Ghz dual processor box -- like it's still 2001...oh please! Dr. Dobbs says the free ride is over, and we now have to come up with some concurrency, but all I have is dollars... What gives?"
Moore's law has nothing to do with processor frequency. It says that semi-conductor capacity doubles every 18 monthsm, not frequency. (With the corollary that there is no appreciable change in price). As we all know, semi-conductor capacity is roughly proportional to speed, so saying processor speeds double every 18 months is not quite wrong, just a little inaccurate. On the other hand, saying that we're not seeing 10 ghz processors, so Moore's law is broken is wrong.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Ah, yes.
/. /.)
f mel.html 9 .html
It seems that we need to review
The Story of Mel.
I'll post it here from several places,
So that the good people of
(and the other people of
Don't wipe out a single server (yeah, right!)
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
http://www.wizzy.com/andyr/Mel.html
http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/t/thestoryo
http://www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon_4
and, of course, many other places.
That was never the limit of copper. It was the limit of voiceband phone lines, which have artificially constrained bandwidth. Since voiceband is now transmitted digitally at 64Kbs, that's the hard theoretical limit, and 56K analog modems are already asymptotically close to that.
If you hook different equipment to the phone wires without the self-imposed bandwidth filters, then it's easy to get higher bandwidth. Ethernet and its predecessors has been pushing megabits or more over twisted pair for decades.