I would like to add that Moore's law has been quite accurate in
the last 10 years, adding approximately 2 orders of magnitude to
our ability to process mail in the same period.
Although the portions of the systems subject to Moore's law helps
there are critical components which have not improved much at all in
the same time period.
For example, disk speed isn't all that much faster today than it was
10 years ago. Where CPUs have improved by about 1000-fold, disk has
improved maybe 10-fold or so, and mechanically much less (1993,
3600RPM, 2003, 7200-10,000RPM, seek times have barely changed at all
remaining in the single-digit ms range, albeit cheaper.)
So, unless you're crunching numbers which all fit in memory, Moore's
law is not a reasonable gauge of e-mail processing improvement. And
often this sort of processing can only proceed as fast as its weakest
link, which is likely to be disk speed.
Cheaper RAM enabling much more aggressive and accurate caching of
course clouds this picture somewhat.
But to imply that because CPUs have gone from 1MHZ to 3GHZ that we can
now process 3000x as much mail is unsupportable and misleading.
--
-Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | bzs(_at_)TheWorld(_dot_)com |
http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD
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