Old lang syne

Roberto Saracco June 1, 2015 Blog 119 Views

Just run onto an interesting "flash back" article on the evolution of storage and processing celebrating the 50 years of the Moore’s Law.
Although it does not contain anything new, it is about history not about the future, seeing all the past flowing by in just two minutes (the time it took to read the article and look at the infographics) is somehow fashinating.
Back in 1956, that is 60 years ago (almost) IBM managed to create a huge storage capacity: 5MB, for its RAMAC computer (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control). And that was made by piling up 50 magnetic disks each 24 inches in diameter with an access time of 600ms (over half a second!) at a cost of 165,000$.
Now, in 2015, you can buy for your home computer 6TB storage hard disk at a cost of few hundred $ and it can stay in the pal of your hand. Iv you take into account capacity, size, speed and cost the performance increase is in the order of a trillion times (thousands of billions).
Take a look at the infograph telling the story of processing power increase. Here the representation points to the "computers" that had/have a certain thresholds capacity measured in floating point instructions per second.
Clearly the increase in processing power has been staggering from thousands of FLOPS to quadrillions of FLOPS (an increase by a factor of 100 billions) but what has hit my curiosity is to notice the spread of devices that have "acquired" processing power and the amount of processing power they have.  An Apple watch has a processing power of some 4 billion FLOPS: it rests on you wrist and it crunches 4,000,000,000 instructions per second!
Again, no real news here but seeing it all under different perspectives makes you think about the future we have created and the future still to be invented.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.

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