When will we see TeraFLOP CPU's?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
ambam

ambam

Distinguished
Jun 5, 2010
1,166
0
19,290
Graphics cards surpassed the "supercomputing" (trillions of calculations per second) teraFLOP (floating point operations per second) scale after the old Radeon HD 4870 series in 2008, but CPU's can only produce a few hundred gigaflops (billions of calculations per second) at best.

When CPU's do eventually break the TFLOP barrier, how would we benefit from having that much CPU power?
 
Solution
USAFRet


Let's look back a few years.
A 386 or 486 CPU was king. 4MB of RAM, maybe a 105MB hard drive.
All for the low price of $3,000.

What could you do with such a low powered system? Design the Space Shuttle. Run a nuclear power plant. Build and launch the GPS system.

Today? Your coffee maker has more brain than that. Your phone? It has more brain than the entirety of MIT in 1985. And what do you do with it? Angry Birds and Twitter.

What will faster chips and devices enable us to do in the future? Who knows.
Maybe solve global hunger, or play the next iteration of Halo.
Sort by date Sort by votes
USAFRet

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Mar 16, 2013
171,442
17,908
184,590


Let's look back a few years.
A 386 or 486 CPU was king. 4MB of RAM, maybe a 105MB hard drive.
All for the low price of $3,000.

What could you do with such a low powered system? Design the Space Shuttle. Run a nuclear power plant. Build and launch the GPS system.

Today? Your coffee maker has more brain than that. Your phone? It has more brain than the entirety of MIT in 1985. And what do you do with it? Angry Birds and Twitter.

What will faster chips and devices enable us to do in the future? Who knows.
Maybe solve global hunger, or play the next iteration of Halo.
 
Upvote 1 Downvote
Solution
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom