The World in 2030

60 The World in 2030
as a teraflop. The chip is about the size of a large
postage stamp, but it has the same calculation speed
as a supercomputer that, in 1996, took up about
2,000 square feet and drew about 1,000 times more
power. 115
This news from Intel, still an industry leader after many
decades, suggests that Dr. Nick Bostrom’s 1997 prediction
about the increase in computer power that would occur between
the years 1997-2007 is at least accurate and has probably
been exceeded. But the important point to note in the
extract from the MIT Technology Review story is that dramatic
miniaturisation occurred in the chip design along with
a significant reduction in energy used during operations.
In fact, the amount of energy now demanded by multicore
microprocessors has become a significant issue. The
Economist observed in March 2007:
The first (energy conservation method) is new ‘multicore’
processor chips, in which performance is improved
not by increasing clock speed, but by building
several processing engines, or ‘cores’, into each
chip—a far more energy-efficient approach. AMD,
Intel and Sun now boast of their chips’ ‘performance
per watt’ (i.e. work done for each unit of energy),
rather than simply emphasising raw performance.
Dual-core chips are commonplace, and quad-core
chips are spreading too. The switch from dual-core
to quad-core over the past 18 months increased performance
per watt by a factor of 4.5, says Stephen
Smith of Intel. 116