[sdiy] PCBoards at home

[Rainer Buchty]

On Wed, 30 May 2007, John Mahoney wrote:

> Watch out for future shock if you visit the 21st century: I hear 
> they've got quad-processor CPUs running at over 3 gigahertz

Even worse. They have 8-processor-CPUs running at over 5 GHz. 

In fact, the Cell's SPEs can be easily clocked as high as 5,7GHz 
(requiring the voltage to be raised to 1.4V) and still consume just 
about 11W per core. 

> and terabyte hard drives (that's a million megabytles!).

Actually, that's what me amazes most -- the speed at which things 
happened.

My first own computer (in 1983) was a Sinclair ZX81 (Timex TS1000 for 
the US). Sure, the 1kB stock was even then very low. But 32kB was fine 
to work with, a 3.54MHz CPU rather fast (if not hindered by some fancy 
ULA wanting all bus access for itself to render the display...) -- and a 
170kB disk (per side) was plenty back in those days, 5-10MB HDs were 
huge (also in price...)

10 years later we already had 50MHz machines (factor ~10) and 1GB HD 
(factor 500), now we have 3GHz (factor ~500) machines and 1TB HD (factor 
1000).

And we always found methods to keep the working and storage experience 
as (s)low as back in the days...

The question is: how do you want to fill a 1PB (2^50 Bytes) HD in 10 
years, assuming the growth rate continues?

Even with 7.1/24Bit/96kHz that's 2^50/2,304,000=5655.92 days or about 
15.5 years of audio. We could easily fit a life-long audio log in full 
surround onto 10 HDs. 

Well, make it "a fraction of one", cause 20 years in the future we will 
then have 1EB (2^60) HDs :)

Rainer