Building blocks Quote by Erik Brynjolfsson

““axis, all of those straight-ish lines would look like the first graph above of Andy’s tribble family—horizontal most of the way, then suddenly close to vertical at the end. And there would really be no way to graph them all together—the numbers involved are just too different. Logarithmic scaling takes care of these issues and allows us to get a clear overall picture of improvement in digital gear. It’s clear that many of the critical building blocks of computing—microchip density, processing speed, storage capacity, energy efficiency, download speed, and so on—have been improving at exponential rates for a long time. To understand the real-world impacts of Moore’s Law, let’s compare the capabilities of computers separated by only a few doubling periods. The ASCI Red, the first product of the U.S. government’s Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, was the world’s fastest supercomputer when it was introduced in 1996. It cost $55 million to develop and its one hundred cabinets occupied nearly 1,600 square feet of floor space (80 percent of a tennis court) at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.10 Designed for calculation-intensive tasks like simulating nuclear tests, ASCI Red was the first computer to score above one teraflop—one trillion floating point operations* per second—on the standard benchmark test for computer speed. To reach this speed it used eight hundred kilowatts per hour, about as much as eight hundred homes would. By 1997, it had reached 1.8 teraflops.””

— Erik Brynjolfsson