Page last updated 2001-07-26
Data last updated 2000-09-12
I will often obssess over technology trends -- where
it's going, and how fast, and what we're likely to see in the
future. This is particularly true of commodity computer technology.
I have newspaper clippings going back to 1992, which I typed into my laptop
computer a few months before it died, taking its data with it.
So sad. I will get around to re-entering it all sometime.
More recently, I have a script that this server runs nightly, which reads PixelUSA's current hardware price list from their web site. Why Pixel? A number of reasons:
* Pixel has consistently low prices.
* Pixel has a good selection of stuff.
* Pixel is where I buy all of my hardware.
* Pixel has a good web site where my websucker can get this stuff.
* Pixel will probably be around for a while, and as long as all of my data calls from one source, it is more likely to remain coherent.
Pixel doesn't offer the dirt-cheapest
prices, for those I could just scan pricewatch.com, but that's okay.
Truthfully, I stick with Pixel because they're also consistently honest in
their business dealings, something that is hard to come by in the commodity
computer market. Many shops will restock known-bad components,
or try to screw you out of your money-back guarantee. I used to
shop at HiTech USA, but they were too dishonest, so I switched to Pixel.
Anyway, back to hardware trends .. different
computer-related technologies all seem to follow different exponential growth
curves, depending on the technology and the metric one uses to measure them.
Many people are familiar with "Moore's Law", which is a rule of thumb that
transistor densities in integrated circuits increases by a factor of 2 every
24 (or 18, depending on who you ask) months. Moore's Law has been
fairly accurate when it comes to microprocessor density, mostly because the
microprocessor manufacturers have held themselves to it as a metric
for their own performance.
Other exponential rates of improvement include:
* 2.15x / year hard disk data capacity per dollar
* 1.76x / year DRAM data capacity per dollar
* 1.70x / year microprocessor performance (SPECint2K base per dollar)
Above figures are all fairly naively calculated,
but the technology continues to amaze me by following naive projections. I try to base my calculations on "best value per buck" price points -- for instance, when making up hard drive statistics, I will choose IBM's Deskstars, because they are very high quality for very little more money than other vendors' drives, and I will pick the 60GB model because even though it is not their largest drive or their cheapest drive, it does provide the highest GB-per-dollar of all of the IBM Deskstars. This seems like the most reasonable policy to follow, to me.
Now and then I pause in my daily stuff and look at some of the most recent numbers and play with perl scripts which print out projections, and I hem and haw over them before going back to work. I really should be saving those things and putting them up on this web site, but I'm pretty bad that way. Maybe I'll get better.
Here are some relevant links:
* Pixel USA
* SPEC 2000 performance benchmark
Here is some of my raw data .. it is fairly lossy, with many holes in coverage (due to lack of network connection, or PixelUSA changing their web site format without my noticing, etc). It is not up to date .. I will copy over the most up to date data one of these days, but probably not until after I have upgraded my web server to a larger hard drive. Things are getting cramped in here.
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