Optimistic Observer 05/23/24
By Capital Investment Counsel - May 23, 2024
Exponential growth is still happening in tech. The observation that the number of transistors on computer chips doubles approximately every two years is known as Moore's Law. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, made this observation in 1965. More than 50 years later, it still holds. Read more here.
We see exponential growth in other areas as well. The computational power of supercomputers basically doubles every 18 months. Computing efficiency, measuring the energy use of computers, has halved every 1.5 years over the last 60 years
Exponential progress is also found in the cost of computer memory and storage. In the chart, we see the cost of computer storage across different mediums – disks, flash drives, and internal memory – since the 1950s. This is measured in price per terabyte. The price of a terabyte of storage would have cost $87 BILLION in 1956. Today, it costs $11. That's pretty good deflation.
Speaking of supercomputers...this feels like it should be a bigger deal in the world. The Aurora Supercomputer reached a performance milestone of 1.012 exaflops, making it one of only two officially recognized exascale systems globally. The exascale barrier refers to a supercomputer achieving a performance level of at least one exaflop, which is one quintillion (10^18) floating-point operations per second. This milestone is significant because it marks a new threshold in computational power, enabling more complex simulations, data analyses, and advancements in fields like climate modeling, particle physics, and artificial intelligence. This epic achievement puts the US firmly in the lead, boasting the top two most powerful supercomputers on the planet, according to the latest Top500 list unveiled at the 2024 ISC High-Performance conference. Read more here.
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