NJR-Team Blog

In Hollywood movies, the computers of the future are super powerful, they can talk, they can understand what we’re saying, they even try to take over the world, however will any of this happen or will it remain fantasy? It may very well one day be possible but there is no way of knowing for sure.

There are relationships between the power of calculation and the number of transistors in a computer. There is also a pattern where the increase of the number of transistors in a computer depends upon the year it was made, this pattern is called “Moore’s law”, so by comparing the number of transistors in the #1 Top super computer of today [the Roadrunner] we will be able to find out how long it will take before we have such computers in our own home.

The “Roadrunner” was bought in 2008 at the cost of 125 million dollars, it is the most powerful computer in the world according to top500.com, a website ranking the top super computers. The “Roadrunner” is used by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) and National Nuclear Security Administration. This super computer is made with a total of 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs and of 6,480 AMD Opteron 2210. The 129600 core of this dream computer delivers a total of 1.71 petaflops . The IBM PowerXCell 8i contains 250 million transistors each and the AMD Opteron 2210 have around 243 million transistors. So in total, this monster of power has 481,46 billion transistors.

With this information, we can use Moore's law , “ the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years”. If Moore’s theory continues to be true after 2020, knowing that the number of transistor in the new Intel i7 processor is 731 million, then we can calculate that we should all have a computer like the “Roadrunner” in our homes in approximately 18 to 19 years.

At this time we can only dream of the tools that could be available to us with this kind of power. Will our every day pixelated video games end up looking more like 500 million dollars simulators? Wouldn’t it be superb to have such technology? No one can really predict what the future will look like, for instance, if you think back at what people in 1990 were saying about what would come after the millenium, you can see most of it was very grandiose.