Should we still care about increased processor speeds?
David Pogue
Tech columnist, The New York Times
You shouldn’t care about the speed of the PC on your desk. It’s probably plenty fast – for today’s software. But you should care about the speed of PCs in general. In other words, some guy who bought a top-of-the-line Dell back in 1990 might have considered it superfast, but that was before Doom 3 and video Skype. Horsepower inspires the creation of new software that pushes the limits, which triggers the creation of greater PC speed, and on the cycle goes.
Shekhar Borkar
Director, Microprocessor Technology Lab, Intel
If you want more-intelligent computers, you’ll need a ton more performance. Imagine computers with learning capabilities and awareness of their surroundings. For instance, we could have a phone that can translate languages on the fly.
Rudy Rucker
Sci-fi novelist,
The Lifebox, the Sea Shell, and the Soul
It was once impractical to do word processing in real time, but today’s PCs run Microsoft Word as smoothly as I could possibly want. So a faster computer wouldn’t affect my current style of writing. But much faster CPUs would allow quantum jumps in the things we do with them. I am speculating about a kind of work called a metanovel, wherein every possible action path will be autonomously traced. This could arise if we had vastly greater computational abilities.
START
Choose Your Own Adventure Returns
The Worst: Stupid Engineering Mistakes
ping
