• Question: Can computers get forever faster?

    Asked by hugocito2 on 7 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Daniel Rhodes

      Daniel Rhodes answered on 7 Jun 2018:

      That’s a really difficult question. I would assume no, at least in the short term. Mainly because, in the last 50 years or so, computational power has increased exponentially, which is really fast! This has been following something known as Moore’s law, named after the guy who founded Intel, one of the largest chip manufacturers. He basically said that every year you would be able to fit twice as many transistors on a chip as the year before (due to miniturisation techniques), and this has been driving the increase in computer power. However, we are about to reach a point where we can no longer make transistors smaller, and therefore this will no longer be true. So – this means the the rate of increase in computer power will definitely slow down.
      BUT – there is something people are trying to develop called quantum computing – which would totally revolutionise computing. This is a really long way off though.

    • Photo: Ashley Akbari

      Ashley Akbari answered on 7 Jun 2018:

      There is usually an exponential curve to improvements where things can always improve but not at the same rate or scale – so for now i do not know if we know where we are on the curve, but at some point things will probably level off (unless completely new technology is created in which case this could start all over again)

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