Thursday, February 19, 2004
Nvidia Talks Up PCI Express at IDF:: I love the progress of technology. By 2020 we should have computers which are as advanced, with respect the the number of FLOPs, as the human brain:
"The vast majority of the session was devoted to a crystal-ball gaze at what PC graphics' future might be. To begin with, Tamasi gave us a look at the specs of a typical high-end system from 1994. We had 100MHz CPUs, 100MB/sec bus speeds, 4MB of main RAM, half a gigabyte of hard disk space, and graphics cards that offered paltry 40 megapixels per second fill rates -- with no geometric processing and only 1-2MB of frame buffer memory. Contrast such a system with today's best and you can see that things have really progressed in ten years. In some areas, quite a bit faster than Moore's Law.
Tamasi extrapolated these trends a decade into the future, to illustrate what PCs and PC graphics cards would be capable of in 2014 (provided that technology continues to march apace): CPUs operating at 100GHz with 10 terabyte hard disks, 44GHz system RAM with bandwidth of 160GB/sec. Graphics cards will be able to handle 127 billion vertices and fill 270 billion pixels a second with over 3 terabytes a second of memory bandwidth and frame buffers of around 32 gigabytes. The computational power will be around 10 teraflops – enough to be ranked one of the top ten large-scale supercomputers by today's standards. This would be enough to render Shrek in pixel-perfect detail in real-time, with power to spare. Ten years may seem like a long way off, but when put in terms of technological evolution, we'll have amazing computing power on our desktops before we know it."
"The vast majority of the session was devoted to a crystal-ball gaze at what PC graphics' future might be. To begin with, Tamasi gave us a look at the specs of a typical high-end system from 1994. We had 100MHz CPUs, 100MB/sec bus speeds, 4MB of main RAM, half a gigabyte of hard disk space, and graphics cards that offered paltry 40 megapixels per second fill rates -- with no geometric processing and only 1-2MB of frame buffer memory. Contrast such a system with today's best and you can see that things have really progressed in ten years. In some areas, quite a bit faster than Moore's Law.
Tamasi extrapolated these trends a decade into the future, to illustrate what PCs and PC graphics cards would be capable of in 2014 (provided that technology continues to march apace): CPUs operating at 100GHz with 10 terabyte hard disks, 44GHz system RAM with bandwidth of 160GB/sec. Graphics cards will be able to handle 127 billion vertices and fill 270 billion pixels a second with over 3 terabytes a second of memory bandwidth and frame buffers of around 32 gigabytes. The computational power will be around 10 teraflops – enough to be ranked one of the top ten large-scale supercomputers by today's standards. This would be enough to render Shrek in pixel-perfect detail in real-time, with power to spare. Ten years may seem like a long way off, but when put in terms of technological evolution, we'll have amazing computing power on our desktops before we know it."
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