My First Million!
By Dave McGraw
Saturday, March 13, 2004
The first computer I ever built, an IMSAI 8080, still works, and is an 8-bit, 2 mHz machine w/ 32 kilobytes of RAM. The most recent computer I've built is a 64-bit, 2 gHz machine with 1 gig of ram. So my most recent computer has 8x my first computer's word length, 1000x the clock speed, and 32,768x as much RAM. Based on the Linpack Benchmark, I estimate my newest IBM PC-compatible computer to be 125,000 times the processing power of my first PC-compatible computer. That only applies if my first PC-compatible, an 8088 based machine, had the 8087 math co-processor installed -- a $90 upgrade at the time. That machine had about 8 times the processing power of my IMSAI 8080, so I now make machines that are more than 1 million times as powerful as my first. That's 29 years and a factor of 1,000,000.
In fact, my $2,000 Athlon-64 with its associated graphics card and storage subsystems would run hundreds of circles around the fastest computer in the world when I started building my own computers: The $8,860,000 Cray 1. What a ride!
SYSTEM: CRAY-1 (late1976) -------------------------- Athlon-64: (early 2004)
PRICE: CRAY-1: $8,860,000 -------------------------- Athlon-64: $2,000
CLOCK: CRAY-1: 80 mHz ---------------------------- Athlon-64: 2000 mHz
MEMORY: CRAY-1: 1 Million 64-bit words (8MB Ram) ------ Athlon-64: 1024 MB Ram
WEIGHT: CRAY-1: 11,000 lbs -------------------------- Athlon-64: 45 lbs
MFLOPS: CRAY-1: 80 ---------------------------- Athlon-64: 5,831
Price/MFLOP CRAY-1: $110,750 ----------------------------- Athlon-64: $0.34
To put this in a personal perspective, I expect to stick around to see my "first billion", which should happen within the next 15 years. My computer in the year 2019 should be at least 1000 times as powerful as my Athlon-64 of 2004, and 1,000,000,000 times as powerful as my IMSAI 8080 of 1977. I will be turning 64 years old that year, and along about that same time, I expect the computational power of the fastest computer in the world to approximate the power of a human brain. If I could live to be 79 years old (a stretch considering my habits) then I would expect to achieve my "first trillion", and my computer should finally be more intelligent than I.
But wait! There is a more profound point I want to make with this. My quaint computer hobby is part of something that will overwhelm human society as we know it, and it will happen this century. We are approaching something that author/scientist Ray Kurzweil calls "The Singularity". The ever-optimistic Kurzweil might get a little ahead of reality at times, but if only a fraction of what he is suggesting comes true, the changes coming at all of us from the exponential growth of computing and other technologies will overwhelm and invade every facet of our lives, transforming our planet, and who we are, in the process.