Moore’s Law: Computers double in speed/power/capability every 18 months or so.
Check out this data.
The US has pushed Japan off the top of the supercomputing chart with IBM’s prototype Blue Gene/L machine. It is being assembled for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, under the US Department of Energy. IBM test results show that Blue Gene/L has managed speeds of 70.72 teraflops (70 trillion operations a second). The previous top machine, Japan’s NEC Earth Simulator, clocked up 35.86 teraflops.
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The first supercomputer, the Cray-1, installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, US, in 1976, was capable of 80 megaflops (80 million operations a second).
1976 –> 2006 = 30 years = 20 lots of 18 months.
80 megaflops x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 … (20 times) = 84 teraflops.
so Los Alamos is running almost right on the numbers in support of Moore’s Law.
And yes, I know, it isn’t a Law – it’s a Rule of Thumb… see Intel’s site for further information.
from Intel