Saturday, December 08, 2007

Robot Revolution ETA 2015

I thought this was kinda fun: You can now buy a 1 teraflop super computer from HP that you can plug into a normal wall socket and doesn't need a data center. It costs about $50K. (That's about 50x faster than a pretty high end desktop).
For comparison, in 1998, the fastest civilian super computer in the world was the IBM Blue Gene with 9000+ Pentiums running at 1.3 teraflops and costing over $5MM. They've become dramatically cheaper in the last couple years w. all the multi-core chips.
A $100K computer in 2006 costs about $20K today (same performance).
Estimates are that all of the top 500 super computers in the world will run over 1 Petaflop by 2015.
Asimov's "positronic brains" always ran at 1 petaflop, so, not only are we going to run out of energy, have half the coastlines in the world under water and enormous droughts, but there will be a robot rebellion too. Watch your Roomba for odd behavior.

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