Google's got 'em beat [LWN.net]

Google's got 'em beat

Posted Jun 6, 2007 10:40 UTC (Wed) by ekj (subscriber, #1524)
In reply to: Google's got 'em beat by flewellyn
Parent article: DreamWorks Animation 'Shrek the Third': Linux Feeds an Ogre (Linux Journal)

Times change. Terabytes used to be a terrible impressive word. There used to be Microsoft "Terraserver".

These days you can get a terabyte in a single normal SATA hard-disc (though 2*500GB is still cheaper) for a cost low enough that it's achievable for the average western teenager...

Terabytes of RAM is also not as impressive as it used to be. You get 1GB of RAM for aproximately $30. So a Terabyte of RAM is $30.000 or thereabouts -- assuming you get no discount whatsoever for buying a thousand of them at once (probably an unsound assumption)

OK, so it's not a single desktop-machine, but it's not "WOW" stuff either.
These days you need to talk about atleast petabytes of RAM before you even start entering "WOW"-territory.

Yeah, it's hard for us old-timers. I saved up for quite some time to upgrade my Amiga to 1024KB of memory, from the original 512KB. And I used to be impressed with the Amiga -- a full order-of-magnitude improvement over my previous machine...

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Google's got 'em beat

Posted Jun 6, 2007 12:08 UTC (Wed) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

I am sometimes struck when I notice a single file on my disk that would have filled the 50MB hard drive I had on my Amiga back in 1991....

-Rob

Google's got 'em beat

Posted Jun 6, 2007 12:49 UTC (Wed) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link]

Try ocean or atmosphere modelling. The output files of my models typically don't (or just) fit on the drive of my workstation (presently a laptop). That's been the case for the last 8 years, so the problem doesn't seem to be going away, either :-)

We will always push software as far as the hardware will go, I think.