• Question: Can computers keep getting faster?

    Asked by oakesi to Dave on 12 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Dave Bond

      Dave Bond answered on 12 Mar 2015:

      Yes they can.

      Look at moore’s law this is the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future.

      So though processors are not getting any quicker we are putting more cores on a chip every year allowing the overall chip to be quicker. Chips seemed to peak about 3.4 giga hertz since then they have dropped to 2.5 GHz but you can get four or more cores on that chip.

      The speeds dropped a little as this was the sweet spot, for cost and heat dissipation .

      Diamond runs clusters of computers with 20 cores in a single computer for instance.

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