The World in 2030

The World in 2030 59
than a single gigabyte of storage but shirt-pocket processing
power has not yet multiplied by a factor of 50 million.
So where precisely are we ten years later, and where will
we be in terms of processor speed and power in the year
2030?
The answer is that this simplistic question about
microprocessor power is no longer adequate or appropriate
to judge computer performance.
Computer power no longer relies on the speed of a single
processor. Today, computing is a networked activity, both
within microprocessor architecture and between independent
computers. Microprocessors now have multiple ‘cores’ (i.e.
processing engines) and many multi-core processors are
harnessed together in a ‘cluster’ or ‘grid’ of computer power
which can be ‘local’ or truly ‘global’.
An idea of how powerful multi-core processors are
becoming may be gleaned from the following story which
appeared in the magazine MIT Technology Review in
February 2007:
Last week, Intel announced a research project that
made geeks jump with glee: the first programmable
‘terascale’ supercomputer on a chip.
The company demonstrated a single chip with 80
cores, or processors, and showed that these cores
could be programmed to crunch numbers at the rate
of a trillion operations per second, a measure known