Slashdot points to an article in Wired Magazine (Issue 14.10, Oct. 2006) called “The information factories“. In particular, I found interesting these parts:
- “In the PC era, the winners were companies that dominated the microcosm of the silicon chip. The new age of petacomputing will be ruled by the masters of the remote data center – those who optimally manage processing power, electricity, bandwidth, storage, and location.”
- “Proud of their front end of public search and advertising algorithms, the G-men hide their hardware coup behind an aw-shucks, bought-it-at-Fry’s facade. They resist the notion that their advantage springs chiefly from mastering the intricate dynamics of a newly recentralized computing architecture.”
- “Over 15 years, that’s an advance of 7,500 times for the hard drive and 60 times for the processor. By this crude metric, the cost-effectiveness of hard drives grew 125 times faster than that of processors.”
- “Intel, introducing its competing Core architecture, recently acknowledged that the market now values energy efficiency over clock speed.”
- “This triumph of centralization is a strange, belated vindication of Grosch’s law, the claim by IBM’s Herbert Grosch in 1953 that computer power rises by the square of the price. That is, the more costly the computer, the better its price-performance ratio. Low-cost computers could not compete. In the end, a few huge machines would serve all the world’s computing needs. Such thinking supposedly prompted Grosch’s colleague Thomas Watson to predict a total global computing market of five mainframes.
The advent of personal computers dealt Grosch’s law a decisive defeat. Suddenly, inexpensive commodity desktop PCs were thousands of times more cost-effective than mainframes.”