The Information Factories Are Here

prostoalex writes, "Wired magazine has coined a new term for the massive data centers built in the Pacific Northwest by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Cloudware is, ironically, a return of the centralized data and bandwidth power houses caused by the decentralized and distributed nature of the Internet. George Gilder thinks we're witnessing something monumental: 'According to Bell's law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born? How will we feed it? How will it be tamed? And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?'"

Comments

death of copyrights

[argoff]

What is going to happen, or what is happening, is that the service value of information is exceeding the content value of information, and will continue to do so at a greater rate from now on. The information age is doing to information services what the industrial revolution did for production. Eventually, information restrictions like copyrights will be such an incredible and annoying hinderence on providing information services that the financial pressure to kill them will become unbearable.

Re:power doubles about every two years

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the saying goes that computing power doubles every 24 months. but i have found that in the real world, the number is closer to 30 months.

the benchmark: Content Creation Winstone 2000. it works out all the parts of a pc.

(under windows 2000):

(introduced in May 1997)
intel pentium II 300Mhz
score: 15

(introduced in Oct 1999)
intel pentium III 733Mhz
score: 30

thats 29 months to double

under windows 98SE:

april 1998
intel pentium II 400Mhz
score: 19.5

nov 2000
intel pentium 4 1500Mhz
score: 42

thats 31 months to double

OUTLOOK FOR NEXT FIFTY YEARS
(for thirty month performance doubling rate):

in 30 months: TWICE the performance.
in 60 months: FOUR TIMES the performance. ...
in 25 years we will have ONE THOUSAND times the performance.
and, in 50 years we will have ONE MILLION TIMES THE PERFORMANCE!!!!!!!

will that finally be enough to make our computers as smart as we are? how many watts of electricity will it consume?

CPUmark99 doubling:
24 months

sysmark 2000 double time: 27 months

ccwinstone04 double times 30 months