Has technology stagnated

[JS80]

Clock speed has not increased in the past 5 or 6 years.

2004 - 3ghz
2011 - 3 or 4 ghz

It seems that instead of increasing the core speed, intel and amd are trying to streamline their cpus to work more efficient and adding more cores and faster cache.

The cpu on my home computer is a 2.6 ghz quad core, which is slower then the 2.8 ghz single core cpu the quad core replaced.

I totally agree. My car's top speed is like 105 MPH, and it hasn't gone up in decades. Damn stagnate technology!

 

[BudAshes]

safety is what kills technology. if we were willing to risk human lives like we used to we would still be developing technology/medicine at the same pace.

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

I do not think technology has stagnated. As little as 5 years ago I had a dial up connection that could not do anything besides basic web browsing. My cell phone did not have 3g and the Xbox 360 was a massive, loud, hot, and unreliable POS. 720p 32" LCD monitors were $500 on sale.

5 years later I have high speed internet that can stream SD video content and HD video content. My cell phone is capable of 4G and the Xbox 360 is a silent, small and efficent machine. 32" 1080p LCD's can be had for $300 on average.

The scale of the technological advances isnt that great but it is moving towards a more mobile solution.

We are moving to a place where things are efficent, economical, and powerful. No longer do we need to spend $1000 to buy a PC for web browsing and light usage. A $400 laptop can do all of that and more.

Technology has advanced pretty far from my point of view.

 

[TuxDave]

We have been in the 3ghz range for the past 7 years. Where are the 10ghz, 15ghz and 20ghz cpus?

What if I told you a 10,15,20GHz CPUs are a terrible design? There are better methods of gaining performance and that's what the industry is doing.

It's like saying we should be lining our tanks wth thicker and thicker armor and so by now we should have armor 500m thick vs using a better material.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

Not at all. Nuclear energy sources are very finite. You can just get a lot more energy from a given mass than you could through chemical interactions of a similar reactive mass.
The nuclear energy that's present in matter was originally put there during its formation - hydrogen and helium and a tiny bit of lithium from the Big Bang, and everything heavier than that formed in stars later on. But it's quite exceedingly short of "infinite power."

This

I think they must've hit some kind of technical roadblock in terms of getting more hertz, which is why they just keep throwing in more cores.

Yup they hit a thermal barrier... P = CfV^2

You increase the frequency you are going to increase the power dissipation, and beyond a certain point you are going to need more voltage for more frequency (as any overclocker will know...)

Helium-3 on the Moon: One tiny little problem there, its density is extremely low. Retrieving a shuttle-bay-sized load of it wouldn't be a quick job. 1-50 parts per billion.

Are they planning on refining on the moon or just bringing the ore back?

 

[gevorg]

Too many people in developed countries are getting dumber and dumber. People value business and finance more than science and engineering. TMZ will soon replace CNN.

 

[FoBoT]

somebody invented bacon lip balm, that is pretty awesome
http://baconsalt.3dcartstores.com/JDs-Bacon-Lip-Balm-12-pack_p_44.html

 

[Atomic Playboy]

If we compared digital cameras to trucks, with a tripling every 5 years, the typical truck should be getting well over 50 miles to the gallon.

I don't know why the same scale for digital camera technology should apply to trucks, but let's extend that logic to some other technology, say, cars. In 1886, cars were capable of going 10 mph. If we extrapolate the rate of technology increase for digital cameras in the last five years to the entire history of cars, we should expect cars to travel at 8,472,886,094,430 mph, or a little over 12,000 times the speed of light. Come on GMC, what is the holdup?

 

[zanejohnson]

now compare that, to how the technology in how to control international monetary systems have changed...

 

[Jeff7]

I think from a programming standpoint, in the age of multitasking it's a lot easier to just assign a CPU and/or priority to an application and let each core handle a set of processes than have one single one sit there and trying to go alone with only faster cycle processing being it's benefit.

True, but some programs benefit greatly from having a single processor that's incredibly fast - and of course, many programs are simply written for a single processor, since multi-core CPUs were mainly constrained to high-end servers for quite a long time. 🙂
So yes, I do like having multiple cores available because it makes the computer more responsive. It just sucks seeing the one program I need to use chugging along slowly because it can only use 1 core, while the other 3 sit there idle, waiting for something to do.

...
Yup they hit a thermal barrier... P = CfV^2

You increase the frequency you are going to increase the power dissipation, and beyond a certain point you are going to need more voltage for more frequency (as any overclocker will know...)

Well then just make the core really big, to dissipate that. Then change the laws of physics so that high-frequency electrical signals can traverse the extra distance. 😀

Are they planning on refining on the moon or just bringing the ore back?

I'd hope they'd refine it on the Moon, unless we develop Portal technology. That'd be a hell of a lot of material to transport.

 

[Fayd]

From the 1940s - the 1990s it seems that new technology was coming out every few months. In 10 - 20 years after world war II, we went from prop driven planes to jets, and from regular bombs to nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missile.

In the 1990s CPU speeds would double every couple of years. My first computer was a packard bell 75mhz with windows 3.11 and 8 megs of memory in late 1994. In 1999 I was running a 450 mhz cpu.

It seems that vehicle fuel economy has leveled out. Back in the 1980s and 1990s we had cars that got in the high 20, and maybe even the low 30 mpg, and we are still in that range 20+ years later. With gas driven trucks, their gas mileage has really stagnated. The 1/2 ton trucks of today get about the same gas mileage as trucks from the 1990s.

Broadband still has not been brought to rural areas. I live 4 miles from the center of town, and dsl stops about 1/2 mile from my house. The local phone company refuses to extend the lines.

Where is the new technology?

Where are the cars that get double, triple and even quadruple the gas mileage from 20 years ago. Why don't we have a cure for the common cold, or even HIV.

Our space shuttle program has been shutdown. What are the kids of today supposed to look up to?

Our manufacturing base has moved overseas to exploit cheap labor.

It seems to me that progress across the board has stagnated. Everything from cars, to medicine, to computers,,,, new developments seem to be coming to a crawl.

there's a limit to how much energy you can extract from a gallon of gas.

 

[Bignate603]

Sure, why not? The automotive industry is probably the most stagnated thing there is.

There was a movie awhile back about a guy that was making a car with seat belts, power brakes,,,,. The people in the automotive industry laughed at the idea of having seat belts in cars. I think the movie was the tucker,,,, something like that.

Back in world war 2 the planes that had fuel injection out preformed the planes that had carburetors. But for some reason chevy, ford and dodge used carburetors in their cars and trucks for the next 30 years. It was not until the 1980s or 1990s that fuel injection became standard. But in the 1940s engineers knew that fuel injection was superior to carburetors.

Why did it take 30+ years for the automotive industry to adopt a proven technology that was known to be superior.





See above post about fuel injection.

Trucks and cars should have been using fuel injection in the 1950s, and not waited for 30 years.

Maybe, just maybe they didn't start using it because it was ridiculously hard at the current level of technology and nobody was willing to pay for it.

Yes, isn't that the theory behind fission or fusion? "infinite amount of stored energy" - isn't that what makes the nuclear bomb go "boom"?

We have been using internal combustion engines for over 100 years, where are the new motors? Why haven't we broke out of the gas age and gone into the space age?

There "has" to be some kind of better fuel out there besides gasoline and diesel.




We have been in the 3ghz range for the past 7 years. Where are the 10ghz, 15ghz and 20ghz cpus?



Why are we even talking about gas mileage? Why are we still using technology that is over 100 years old?

Again, you're assuming that if you don't understand something it must be easy, or even possible, and "they" (meaning someone other than you) should go do something about it. If it were an easy problem to solve somebody would have done it, made ridiculous amounts of money, and bought an island somewhere to retire to. The fact that no one out of the billions of people in the world has figured it out should clue you in that the problem is ridiculously hard to solve.

 

[Gibson486]

Isn't it obvious? It's stagnant b/c they do not have assets. Duh....

 

[jimbob200521]

somebody invented bacon lip balm, that is pretty awesome
http://baconsalt.3dcartstores.com/JDs-Bacon-Lip-Balm-12-pack_p_44.html

I don't know if I should facepalm this and call it a perfect example of society today, or applaud it and say we have reached the pinnacle of what man can do.

Indeed. This effect is called quantum tunneling. When the gate size of the transistor gets too small, you begin to have higher amounts of leakage current, resulting in lower current density being transported. There is technology out there now (graphene / carbon nanotubes) that have gates sizes that alleviate this problem more or less, but it is still many years off until we replace layers of silicon dioxide as the material of choice for CPU's.

http://www.fisica.unipg.it/~gammaitoni/fisinfo/documenti-informatici/physical-limits-silicon.pdf

See subsection 4.3.3: "Gate tunneling" for more

Thanks for the link!!

Nanowick cooling is also something I'm really, really looking forward to, here's a link to the basics of it:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100722153634.htm

10x the cooling capacity of current technology, 550 watts per square centimeter! If we had this openly, cheaply, and easily available today, CPU HSF's would more or less be obsolete. Hell, as cell phones make more heat, we can apply this technology there and not only make our phones faster, but smaller as well because we won't need the air or space for cooling them (not that we need a lot today, but every little bit counts when making a cell phone as small as possible). Before you know it, when you buy a new computer, you'll be buying something the size of a current cell phone but it'll plug into your monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. We've already got computers close to that now even.

 

[Fayd]

Because they were invested in carburetor technology, and fuel was artificially cheap. Why improve when you can throw more petrol at a problem to make things better?

The move to fuel injection for planes is because fuel injection is not affected by relative position, whereas carburetors are. for a plane that needs to be able to accelerate potentially while upside down, going vertical, etc... this is an important point.

there was no need to switch to fuel injection in cars. the cars that did come out with fuel injection in the 60's and 70's were dog slow compared to the muscle cars of the day, which they were advertised to compete against.

 

[Fayd]

I don't know if I should facepalm this and call it a perfect example of society today, or applaud it and say we have reached the pinnacle of what man can do.



Thanks for the link!!

Nanowick cooling is also something I'm really, really looking forward to, here's a link to the basics of it:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100722153634.htm

10x the cooling capacity of current technology, 550 watts per square centimeter! If we had this openly, cheaply, and easily available today, CPU HSF's would more or less be obsolete. Hell, as cell phones make more heat, we can apply this technology there and not only make our phones faster, but smaller as well because we won't need the air or space for cooling them (not that we need a lot today, but every little bit counts when making a cell phone as small as possible). Before you know it, when you buy a new computer, you'll be buying something the size of a current cell phone but it'll plug into your monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. We've already got computers close to that now even.

umm... that is just a means of absorbing and transporting heat. you're still gonna need a big array of fins or some other means of dissipating the heat in order to get rid of it.

nanowick tubing just moves heat around, it doesn't magically make it dissappear.

 

[tfinch2]

Isn't it obvious? It's stagnant b/c they do not have assets. Duh....

I just overclocked my dinner to 4.6 ghz.

 

[DrPizza]

Back in world war 2 the planes that had fuel injection out preformed the planes that had carburetors. But for some reason chevy, ford and dodge used carburetors in their cars and trucks for the next 30 years. It was not until the 1980s or 1990s that fuel injection became standard. But in the 1940s engineers knew that fuel injection was superior to carburetors.

Superior how? Better gas mileage? I have a 1960 or 61 Allis Chalmers D-15 tractor. Carburetor. I knew *nothing* about how a carburetor worked 2 years ago. With its age, I occasionally have carburetor problems <related note: I finally found the cause - stuff is managing to get past my fuel filter and into the needle valve> I can take the carburetor off that tractor, completely dismantle it, clean it completely, reassemble it, put it back on the tractor, connect everything, and have my tractor restarted in less than 5 minutes. Do THAT with a modern fuel injected vehicle. If someone said "you'll get 10% better fuel economy with a fuel injected tractor." No thanks, because what money I'd save in fuel, I'd spend triple in increased repair costs. 50+ years old an that thing hums right along.

 

[lxskllr]

Superior how? Better gas mileage? I have a 1960 or 61 Allis Chalmers D-15 tractor. Carburetor. I knew *nothing* about how a carburetor worked 2 years ago. With its age, I occasionally have carburetor problems <related note: I finally found the cause - stuff is managing to get past my fuel filter and into the needle valve> I can take the carburetor off that tractor, completely dismantle it, clean it completely, reassemble it, put it back on the tractor, connect everything, and have my tractor restarted in less than 5 minutes. Do THAT with a modern fuel injected vehicle. If someone said "you'll get 10% better fuel economy with a fuel injected tractor." No thanks, because what money I'd save in fuel, I'd spend triple in increased repair costs. 50+ years old an that thing hums right along.

Yea, there's a lot to be said about old tech. It can be finicky to operate, but you can also fix a lot of it on the side of the road. I've pulled a carb, cleaned it on the kitchen table, and had it reinstalled to get to work the next day. With fuel injection, I'd likely be calling a tow truck, and having it towed to a shop.

 

[GTSRguy]

No, it has increased its rate of progress

And that ends the thread

 

[GTSRguy]

Clock speed has not increased in the past 5 or 6 years.

2004 - 3ghz
2011 - 3 or 4 ghz

It seems that instead of increasing the core speed, intel and amd are trying to streamline their cpus to work more efficient and adding more cores and faster cache.

The cpu on my home computer is a 2.6 ghz quad core, which is slower then the 2.8 ghz single core cpu the quad core replaced.

I have to just say my opinion i totally totally disagree. Clock speed means nothing at all. The only real way to measure progress in CPU is the number of transistors on a chip. Since 2003, the number has roughly doubled every 2 years, were currently at over 1 Billion, where as in 2003 we were at roughly 50-100 Million. Evolution in CPUs is moving as fast as ever. In a very short time we will blow past 2 Billion.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ansistor_Count_and_Moore's_Law_-_2011.svg.png

 

[LumbergTech]

From the 1940s - the 1990s it seems that new technology was coming out every few months. In 10 - 20 years after world war II, we went from prop driven planes to jets, and from regular bombs to nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missile.

In the 1990s CPU speeds would double every couple of years. My first computer was a packard bell 75mhz with windows 3.11 and 8 megs of memory in late 1994. In 1999 I was running a 450 mhz cpu.

It seems that vehicle fuel economy has leveled out. Back in the 1980s and 1990s we had cars that got in the high 20, and maybe even the low 30 mpg, and we are still in that range 20+ years later. With gas driven trucks, their gas mileage has really stagnated. The 1/2 ton trucks of today get about the same gas mileage as trucks from the 1990s.

Broadband still has not been brought to rural areas. I live 4 miles from the center of town, and dsl stops about 1/2 mile from my house. The local phone company refuses to extend the lines.

Where is the new technology?

Where are the cars that get double, triple and even quadruple the gas mileage from 20 years ago. Why don't we have a cure for the common cold, or even HIV.

Our space shuttle program has been shutdown. What are the kids of today supposed to look up to?

Our manufacturing base has moved overseas to exploit cheap labor.

It seems to me that progress across the board has stagnated. Everything from cars, to medicine, to computers,,,, new developments seem to be coming to a crawl.

that is the same exact computer i started with when i was 12

 

[paperfist]

What are the kids of today supposed to look up to?

iPhone 5,6,7,8,9,10,11...

 

[Texashiker]

Superior how? Better gas mileage?

Back in world war 2, the carburetor powered planes could not hang with the fuel injected planes on dives and climbs. Once the fuel injected planes started doing climb and dive maneuvers in a dog fight, the carburetor planes would stall out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarine_Spitfire#Carburettor_versus_fuel_injection



Another link

http://news.carjunky.com/fuel-injection-versus-carburetors-abc496.shtml

Sad as it may be, fuel injection systems seem to win out over carburetors in almost every category.

 

[Fritzo]

What if I told you a 10,15,20GHz CPUs are a terrible design? There are better methods of gaining performance and that's what the industry is doing.

It's like saying we should be lining our tanks wth thicker and thicker armor and so by now we should have armor 500m thick vs using a better material.

Exactly. We're at a point where there's too much heat and power requirements to go much higher, so we're looking at dual core and chip efficiency designs, and it's working very well.

We're actually at a point where software isn't keeping up with the power of hardware.