it was 40 years ago today...

 ...that Acorn Computers launched the BBC micro.

Ten years ago, I blogged about this anniversary, and about Moore’s law.  (Wow, I’ve been blogging for over ten years!)

Now we’ve had 40 years, or nearly 27 doubling times since the Beeb.  So Moore’s law, if it still held, would now be saying today's PCs are 100 million times the power of the Beeb (as opposed to the mere one million times of 10 years ago).  Are they?

• Memory: 32kB RAM.  Moore’s law would suggest 3TB of RAM today.  However, 32GB would be pretty beefy, so this is more like one million times the memory, up only a factor of four from 10 years ago.
• Processor speed: 2MHz.  Nowadays 4GHz would be the norm, and would likely be an 8-core, 64 bit processor: barely a factor of 2 or 4 (in number of cores, nothing in processor sppeed) from 10 years ago.  But the trend of going faster by going parallel is the new normal.
• Screen resolution: this has had the smallest change, and essentially none over the last 10 years: still typically 1920x1080 pixels (although I now have two of these, rather than one).
• Disc storage: today would typically be a 250GB or 500GB SSD, and a 1TB or 2TB HD, so that is up by a factor of 2 or 4 in capacity over 10 years, but the SSD gives a big increase in access speed.
• Networking: I didn’t report on this 10 years ago.  This is a qualitative difference between now and 40 years: not network speed, but just the fact of the existence of the Internet, to say nothing of the WWW.

So the long predicted end to Moore’s law is definitely here.  But the increase in home power over those 40 years is none-the-less mind boggling.  And that’s before we talk about GPUs and Raspberry-Pi clusters that some people have at home, or top end high performance super-computing.

I’ll report the next increment in 2031, if blogs still exist then.