Re: Singularity in 18 months?

Cthulhu's Little Helper (skritch@home.com)
Tue, 15 Jun 1999 21:24:23 -0700

On 15 June 1999, Aaron Davidson <ajd@ualberta.ca> wrote:

>I don't know if this is bullshit or not, but it sounds pretty amazing.
>
>A company called "Star Bridge Systems" is claiming they can have $1000
>computers in 18 months which are 60000 times faster than a PII-350:
>
> http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9906/15/supercomp.idg/
>
>That would put us about where moore's law would have us in 20 years, but in
>18 months instead.

Actually, the slashdot write-up of that story got that bit wrong. HAL, a FPGA 'hypercomputer' is roughly 60000 times faster than a PII-350. The company responsible for HAL is also considering basing sub-$1000 PCs on the design. You're not going to get 1 trillion ops per second in a sub-$1000 PC any time soon.