A nice meditation on computing power
Don Lancaster doesn't support permalinks so you have to go
here and scroll down to the entry for December 21, 2006 but it is entirely worth it:
Computing power has gotten FUNDAMENTALLY INSANE.
Just realized I was sitting here solving 14 linear equations in 14 unknowns to 64 bit precision. And worrying about how I was going to speed up the algorithm to get under 120 milliseconds. And being upset that 32-bit math, while useful, was not quite good enough to do the job at hand.
That, of course, is while limping along on an ancient ( almost two years old! ) 750 MHz machine. Compared to back in college where I would spend hours with a K&E log log duplex decitrig slide rule along with the Mathematical Tables from the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics to try and solve a simple transmission line problem. To three percent accuracy.
Just about anybody now has personal computing power that is unimaginably beyond the best available to only the biggest schools or corporations a very few years ago.
Which tells us that these days, if you have a problem, throw some math at it. Another ten million calculations is simply not that big a deal anymore. Brute force reigns supreme.
And no telling where it will lead.
And no telling where it will lead. -- indeed...
These are fun times to be alive. I'm not much into computer gaming but I am into intense graphics (photoshop, etc...) and it was the business of gaming that drove the R&D into the high-end and relativly cheap video cards we have these days.
Posted by DaveH at December 22, 2006 8:03 PM