Want to run an web application? It's instantiated on virtual machines in your pocket. (I know 292 petabytes seems incredulous, but the theoretical maximum data density is 10^66 bits per cubic inch.)
#NES EMULATOR MAC GENE POOL TV#
Want to watch a movie? It's reasonable to have the top 500,000 movies and TV shows of all time (2.5 petabytes) in your pocket by 2035, when you'll have about 292 petabytes of solid-state storage. Want Wikipedia? (14GB) - copy it locally. If I've got a data center in my pocket, I put all the data and applications I might possibly want there. It's largely limited by speed of light issues. You move all applications to your pocket, because latency is the one thing that doesn't benefit from technology gains. I emailed Amber Case and Aaron Parecki about this, and Aaron said "What happens when everyone has a data center in their pockets?" That's roughly all of Google's computing power. It turns out my living room could hold something like 100,000 of these computers, each 2,000 times more powerful one of today's computers, for the equivalent of about two million 2014 computers. If they're all compacted together, it could be even denser. That's assuming we would even want them to be human-replaceable. A "rack" would hold something like 2,800 of these computers.
If they're spaced 1" apart, and 2" apart vertically (like a DIMM memory plugged into it's end), a backplane could hold about 72 of these for every square foot. Imagine today's blade computers used in data centers, except shrunk to the size of sticks of gum. They'll also be about 2,000 times more powerful than one of today's computers. According to the chart above, computers will get smaller than that around 2030, or certainly by 2035. In a spreadsheet right next to the sheet entitled "Attacking nanotech with nuclear warheads," I have another sheet called "Data center size" where I'm trying to calculate how big a data center will be in 2045.Ī stick of is "2-7/8 inches in length, 7/8 inch in width, and 3/32 inch" or about 0.23 cubic inches, and we know this thanks to the military specification on chewing gum. So where does that leave us going forward? To very small places: (If you pick different endpoints, using an IBM PC, a Macbook Air, or a Mac Mini, for example, you'll still get similar sorts of numbers.) I think we can agree that, for some definition of computer, they're shrinking steadily over time.
But the purpose isn't to be exact, but to establish a general trend. I know, you can argue about my choices of what constitutes a computer, and whether I should be including displays, batteries, and so forth. This past weekend I spent some time thinking about the size of computers.įrom 1986 (Apple //e) to 2012 (Motorola Droid 4), my "computer" shrinking 290-fold, or about 19% per year. I love trying to extrapolate trends and seeing what I can learn from the process.