Alright, we`ve come pretty far as processing power goes.

You can now get the PC-Power you need for no money at all.

In a couple of years or so we will probably see 8 Core processors running at 3 GHZ, and programs and games that use multicore technology. It is in my understanding, that already the GPU is the bottleneck in many systems, and will be more so in the future. I predict the need for CPU power will stop completely, as software developers simply cant keep up the pace of technology.

What will happen when the need for power is gone ?

We make a need, or we just do wasteful stuff to use the proccesing power for the heck of it, like modeling the physics of what happens when your computers molecular structure is ripped apart in a nuclear explosion, or if it was tossed into the center of the sun.

Or Microsoft will release an OS that will need more CPU power than the previous version.

You will always need more processing power, if only because programmers are lazy and management is looking for shorter and shorter development times. Perhaps you recall small (in today's terms) programs running under DOS? Some were even hand-crafted assembly code, to wring the maximum performance out of an 8MHz CPU & 640K of RAM. Look at how far we've come - there are some true improvements, but I see more bloatware than ever. Even crap code runs fast under a 4GHz CPU with 8GB of RAM.

There's never enough processing power!! Actually, it more like there's a constant game going between the hardware and software companies. Someone builds a better processor, and a game company comes out with a game that slows the processor to a crawl. And if that doesn't happen, M$ comes out with a new version of Word that takes up everything. A couple decades ago, you could run M$ Word very well on a 286 style chip and 64 kb of ram. Now M$ demands as fast chip and a gb or more of ram. Top that off, and FSX demands as much power as you can feed it from a quad chip.

Software developors are the ones that really test the limits of hardware. Every year or so another new game comes out that renders the last video cards obsolete and ups the processor demand while its at it. So new vieo cards come out, new processors, and the cycle repeats. When we finally get to having holodecks like on Startrek, then maybe I'll be satisfied. No guarentees there, just a maybe.

For now, I eagerly await the next installment of Starcraft, the new Yorkies, a X48 motherboard with some cheap and fast DDR3 ram, and well, you get the picture.

Computers would then keep parts with roughly the same capabilities but become much smaller and less expensive as advances in processor technology allows for the chips to be made very inexpensively and run very efficiently. We're already starting to see this some with people as a whole going from several thousand dollar large desktops to cheap laptops and things like BlackBerries and smartphones as well as portable media devices. An average smartphone has roughly the same computing power as a 10 to 12-year-old desktop but pulls far less power and is a bunch smaller.

Or like some said, we'll still buy ever-more-powerful computers to run ever-more-intensive applications. I see media such as video being a big driving force here at least for a few years as it currently takes a pretty stout CPU to smoothly play back 1080p video without offloading work to a discrete GPU. Also, like some said, code bloat will suck up a bunch of RAM and CPU cycles as long as people put more emphasis on the glitz and shininess factor rather than actual program function. Personally, I am perfectly fine working in a simple GUI environment like TWM, but I consider myself in a distinct minority.

Yeah i got the answer which makes me stop thinking about it.

It will be smaller, and consume less power.

Nobody needs CPU power at all.
The human race has only been able to play with it for a few years. People always want more of everything, this has never changed. CPU power is a want, not a need. That said it becomes clearer why there will always be room for more.

There's plenty of room for growth - imagine sitting down at your computer and having the application already loaded because the AI built into your OS decided that, at 6pm on a tuesday night, you were most likely planning on using whatever program you usually use.

NMR is going to get crazy, too - expect to see devices that can map out all of the atoms in your body simply with one brief scan. It will happen in our lifetimes, if progress isn't hampered by something unpredictable. Your computer might be able to read your thoughts, one day, via this or some other technology. In terms of the science, it's definitely a possibility.

We were kind of discussing this at work a while back; whereas ten years ago we'd have been writing in C or assembler with highly optimised code cut back to the bare minimum, today we can develop faster in Java than C or C++, not waste much time worrying about optimisation, take far more care over dealing with data which could cause crashes (e.g. buffer overflows) and load the software up with far more instrumentation that allows us to remotely debug it if it does crash.

We write control software which runs on a PC in a rack, so development time and robustness is generally more important than performance (fast enough is fast enough and an hour of downtime could cost many thousands of dollars), and for us the improvement in CPU performance over the last few years has been extremely useful.

I didn't read other poeple answer, so sorry if I'm repeating what as already been said.

For me there will always be a need for more power, just not for all people. With the coming of HD video, we already need more power to encode anything in a reasonable time. We'l probably get HD-HD (high definition high definition) in 5 years from now, so it'll keep on getting worse. Add games engine that are getting physics, AI, and many more thing and I see a need for even more power.

It's only my 2 cents, but the end of the need for more power isn't near.

There are roughly 7x10^27 atoms in a typical human body, that is 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. I hope I live to the point where all of them could be scanned in real time but I seriously doubt it.

The reason we need faster processors is all down to one thing..

The software we run on our pcs...

Who would of dreamed the power we have now, when we were running Pentium 200 MHz on Windows 95 and thought these were the best and fastest things ever.....

At the beginning i had a 1MB Trident ISA Video Card, since then we have had MCI, PCI, AGP, PCI Express 1 and now 2 each faster than the previous with memory on a 8800gts reaching 1GB and putting 3 together gives you 3 GB of Video ram....

We had 3000 nm process on Intel's 8088 to the 32nm - bear in mind a nanometre is a 1,000,000 of a milli metre - so a 32nm is 32 millionths thick of a millimeter - devide a millimetre by 1,000,000 and work how big 32nm is

Processors will move on from 4,8, 16, 32 cores within the next 5 years as Windows Vista will receive more patches to make it bigger...needing more processing power like xp has done. Antivirus programs get bigger....

Games will be true HD will Pixar quality animation, and even hollywood block buster games.... you wont be watching the film, youll be playing it with real live actors polygonned ( i hope thats right ) on your screen or what ever the new term is...

Your only limitation is your imagination...all technology advancements are based on..(peoples imagination) .....

Holograms will be out next screen masterpiece looking around characters backs as well as their fronts......

Video players built in to contact lenses with transmitters from a watch which is the video player sending signals to the lenses...
The lenses will be powered by the salt in your eyes and the watch by static electricity in your body....

Nanobots will kill cancer and other ailments. ....


So for you to say how fast do we need is putting the breaks on progress... With all progress in technology the older versions get smaller and more powerfull.....

We will see things in our lifetime we didnt know was possible due to old stuff being miniturised....

A AMD 64 power in the size of a watch for example, mobile phones now have more processing power than pcs in the 60's that took up whole rooms..


Just look forward to whats comming and enjoy what you got.... Ive been in computers for 25 years machines have been getting faster and faster

Computing Power stagnating ?

Look at a Super Computer with 65536 CPUs !
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500)

Enjoy! ;-)

At the current rate of growth this will never be an issue. The only case where we wouldn't need more power would be if we suddenly switched to one of those 1000x faster processor types... and then we'd only be in that situation for about a year or 2 as programmers discovered how to maximize that power. Then the speed war would continue as it always has.