It seems like microprocessors have been getting smaller and faster for quite some time now.
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Yeah cell phones have the same power as laptops of 8 years ago.
“Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon.”
Deep Blue is another supercomputer that you might have heard of. It is the machine best known for winning against world chess champion Garry Kasparov with a score of 2:1 in a 6-game match. That happened on May 11, 1997, when Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful computer in the world. It boasted a performance figure of 11.38 GFLOPS and could evaluate 200 million positions on the chessboard each second (although still not good enough to run Crysis, we suppose). Today, some 17 years later, the ARM Mali-T628MP6 GPU inside the Exynos-based Samsung Galaxy S5 outputs 142 GFLOPS. And the 192-core GPU on the Tegra K1 SoC produces an even more impressive peak of 364 GFLOPS. Sure, these might not be superior to Deep Blue when it comes to playing chess, but in terms of brute, number-crunching power, these mobile graphics processors stand stronger.
So yeah, technology is definitely advancing, and it is doing so at a rapid pace. What takes a supercomputer to calculate today will most likely be a piece of cake for the smartphones (or whatever they evolve into) that we’ll be using in 2020, just like today’s smartphones have the processing potential of a vintage supercomputer. What we’ll be investing this computational power into, however, is a whole different topic.
I think, in the very near future, bandwidth will be free. In exchange for free bandwidth, cellphones will always be connected and, during when they are not used, they will all be interconnected and forming a massive supercomputer.