24 July 2002

Pinto's Point: PC circa 2010 -- and what beyond?

By Jim Pinto

Today, a $1,000 laptop computer with a Pentium chip has more computing power than was contained in all the computers in the world about 60 years ago. And 100 years ago, all of the mathematicians in the world together did not have the problem-solving resources of a kid today with a $20 pocket calculator.

I remember being very excited with my new 486 machine, with its 40-MB hard drive and 1 MB of RAM. A couple of years later, it was ancient, and my 100-MHz Pentium PC with a 1-GB hard drive, 64 MB of RAM, and CD-ROM was dazzling in comparison. Today, both my desktop and laptop are 1-GHz Pentiums, with 1 GB of RAM and 50-GB hard drives.

Last week, I was helping a friend buy a computer from Dell (on its Web site, of course), and we settled on a 1-GHz Pentium-based PC. We decided to think about it. When we checked back in a couple of days, we found that our selection had been replaced by a 1.2-GHz unit for the same price. This started me wondering what a PC would look like, and cost, if we waited a few years. . . .

Of course, all this is brought about by Moore's Law, which says computing power doubles every 18 months. And that means about 100 times within 10 years. What else will change, other than chip and bus speeds and gigabyte storage?

I'm providing a couple of Web links that predict what the PC—circa 2010—will be. But somehow, I wonder whether performance will simply extrapolate to more storage and faster processing. Just how much faster would I like my spreadsheet and word processor to run?

At the other end of the scale, many processing functions will become cheaper and hence more affordable and more universal. The common or garden PDA will probably do a lot of new things other than computing spreadsheets and processing words. The opportunities for new features and functions are indeed mind-boggling: language translation, speech processing, and face recognition, to name a few examples.

For decades, silicon has been the mainstay of computing. But even Gordon Moore (who originally formulated the law for electronic systems) agrees that we're rapidly approaching the day when silicon will be limited by the triple curse of electronics: "too bulky, too slow, and too hot." Even with technology extensions (such as three-dimensional chips), most people agree Moore's Law will reach a point of saturation within two or three decades.

At that point, computation and processing will be based on new architectures: perhaps nanotechnology, quantum science, optics. And what new powers will that level of processing yield?

• Forbes ASAP: "Introducing the computer of 2010"
• PCWorld.com: "2010—A PC Odyssey"
• PCWorld.com: "Computing in 2010"

Behind the byline

Jim Pinto is founder of San Diego–based Action Instruments. You can e-mail him at jim@jimpinto.com, or view his writings at www.JimPinto.com.