A number of CNC folk have commented to me that Moore's law appears to have run out of steam over the last 12 months or so.

(Moore’s law is “the observation by Intel executive Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every 1.5 years. He also observed that the number of instructions per second performed by a chip also doubles every 1.5 to 2 years. The computing power of microprocessors has been growing exponentially for the last 40 years but this cannot continue indefinitely.
qt2.tn.tudelft.nl/~hadley/nanoscience/glossary.html

Or (put more simply):

The power of microprocessor technology doubles, and its costs of production fall in half every 18 months.
enbv.narod.ru/text/Econom/ib/str/261.html
 
In apparent contradiction of the above-stated law, computers bought 18 months ago still seem quite up to date.

Then there is also the story of one CNC member who bought a modern laptop to take on an outback trip - and the power consumption was so heavy as to make it useless if away from mains power. A heavy-duty car battery charger could not keep up with it.

These 2 stories apparently have a common underlying factor. The still dominant CPU architecture has run out of steam. The current 3 Gigahertz machines run at such high frequency as to use a lot of power and give out a lot of heat - far too much power and heat to be usable in a laptop.

The only way forward is with dual and multi-core processors. These split the computer processing into parallel processors running side by side at a much slower speed, but actually achieving a faster net outcome – like “two heads are better than one” in layspeak.

These multi-core processors are slowly coming in. But to use them to maximum effect will require more expensive motherboards and to also rejigged software.

So until this revolution takes place, we are still in a bit of an interregnum. Laptops and notebooks are not great performers - except where they have changed over to dual core. Desktops are getting bigger power supplies with more elaborate cooling fan arrangements. There will be a price jump when the new architecture takes off - for more expensive motherboards and software to maximise the new power of the multi-core chips. I suppose RAM may also have to be redesigned.

In the meantime, hard drives appear to have been doubling in size every 12 months now for some years.

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