Intel Gets Faster

I remember, shortly after I graduated from college, I was having dinner with my girlfriend at the time and some friends of her. One of them worked as engineer for Intel. He said that they had finally designed a microprocessor that was so fast and so powerful that they had no idea what people would use all of its processing power for.

He even worried for a moment that this might the mean the end of technological advancement, because his company had finally given users more processing power then they could ever use.

For the record, the chip that he was referring to was the Pentium 2.

I thought about that dinner this morning when I was reading through this week's issue of Business Week. Intel has now unleashed a test chip that is capable of processing 1 trillion calculations per second. They are calling this one the Teraflops Research Chip.

This, of course, means that the new chip is roughly 40,000 times more powerful than the one this engineer was worrying would give users more processing power than they could possibly handle. It's an interesting to think back to where things were just a few relatively short years ago.

More than anything though, it makes me wonder what the computing world will be like by the time Teraflops moves out of its research role and is available to everyday users.