Computing Power Quotes

In the entire history of the human species, every tool we've invented has been to expand muscle power. All except one. The integrated circuit, the computer. That lets us use our brain power.

Growing new limbs, copying internal organs like a Xerox machine, exponential increases in computing power, better eyes and ears - I could read stories like this endlessly.

To make a computer do something that would take a human a long period of time was always interesting.

A big part of the success of Microsoft was that every year, the chips our software ran on got faster and cheaper. They doubled in capability every 18 months under Moore's law.

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.

The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we've learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago.

Computers are the most powerful tools that humanity has ever created. Yet, we treat them largely as a black box; as if it were an alien artifact that magically appeared on desks, in homes, and in our pockets.

Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.

One of the big first computers was called SAGE, which was a missile defense, the first missile-defense computer, which was, like, one of the first computers in the history of the world which got sold to the Department of Defense for, I don't know, tens and tens of millions of dollars at the time.

This revolution, the information revoultion, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It's very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now?

It takes these very simple-minded instructions - 'Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it's greater than this other number' - but executes them at a rate of, let's say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.

The future of computer power is pure simplicity.

A lot of the progress in machine learning - and this is an unpopular opinion in academia - is driven by an increase in both computing power and data. An analogy is to building a space rocket: You need a huge rocket engine, and you need a lot of fuel.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

I saw the logarithmic growth of computer power.

He stopped what he was doing and pulled out his magic phone. Okay, the phone wasn't magic, but it does things my computer struggles with.

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

There's no other product that changes function like the computer.

Man-made computers are limited in their performance by finite processing speed and memory. So, too, the cosmic computer is limited in power by its age and the finite speed of light.

The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.

A state-of-the-art calculation requires 100 hours of CPU time on the state-of-the-art computer, independent of the decade.

When I step back and look at what's important to AMD, it's about graphics leadership - visual computing leadership - as well as a strong computing experience. We have the capability to integrate those two together.

If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100 and get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside.

Apple took the edge off the word 'computer.'

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.