Improving Information for Social Policy Decisions -- The Uses of Microsimulation Modeling: Volume II, Technical Papers (1991)
Chapter: Specific Technical Product Information
tomorrow’s desktop machines, so that investments in supercomputing pay off later in terms of desktop productivity.22
Alan Kay has stated that the issue for 1995 is not whether there will be 100 MIPS [millions of instructions per second] in desktop systems—there clearly will be—but rather what will be done with that amount of computational power.23
It was reported in Canadian Datasystems24 that “within two years, desktop computing power will exceed 50 MIPS per user [and that] already desktop MIPS that cost $2,000 apiece are competing effectively with airconditioned MIPS at $130,000 each in large systems…. By 1990–91, the cost of MIPS will drop to $500 apiece.”
In Communications of the ACM25 it was said that “by the year 2000, a single computer chip could potentially solve problems that a supercomputer the size of a refrigerator handles today. Intel Vice President David House predicts his firm will lead the way by introducing a series of three new microprocessing chips over the next 10 years, each one more than quadrupling the speed and power of its predecessor. The i586 chip is slated for 1993, to be followed by the i686 chip in 1996 and the i786 chip by the turn of the century.”
Bell26 (1989) has said that “by 1990 workstations with four to ten 20-MIPS processors attached to a shared bus in a multi configuration that sells for under $50,000 may exist.”
Specific Technical Product Information
Specific product announcements and introductions are useful barometers of the direction and pace of technical progress. Care must be taken, however, to distinguish between announcements and actual introductions27 and between
