Digital Signal Processing Reference
In-Depth Information
INTRODUCTION: THE IMPORTANCE
OF SIGNAL INTEGRITY
1.1 Computing power: past and future
1
1.2 The problem
4
1.3 The basics
5
1.4 A new realm of bus design
7
1.5 Scope of the topic
7
1.6 Summary
8
References
8
1.1 COMPUTING POWER: PAST AND FUTURE
It is estimated that sometime between the years 2025 and 2050, commonplace
personal computers will exceed the calculation power of a human brain. Fur-
ther extrapolation based on historical trends indicates that a single commonplace
computer could exceed the computational power of the human race sometime
between 2060 and 2100. Are such vast increases in computational power possi-
ble in less than 100 years? We cannot say for certain because it is impossible
to predict the future. However, hindsight is always 20/20, and if we subscribe
to the notion that history tends to repeat itself, we can look at the progress of
computational capabilities over the last century to see if historical data support
a rate sufficient to achieve such performance. Hans Moravec, a researcher from
the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Melon University, estimated that a computer
would require 100 million megainstructions per second (MIPS) to mimic suffi-
ciently closely the behavior of a human brain [Moravec, 1998]. Based on the
