ABSTRACT
Computing technology has made incredible progress in the past 65 years. In 1945, there were no stored program computers. Today, a few thousand dollars will purchase a desktop personal computer with more performance, more memory, and more disk storage than a million dollar computer in 1965. This rapid rate of improvement has come from advances in technology used to build the computer and from innovation in computer design. Performance increase is sketched in Figure 54, in terms of a nominal 1965 minicomputer. Performance growth rates for supercomputers, minicomputers, and mainframes are near 20% per year, while performance growth rate for microcomputers is closer to 35% per year. Supercomputers are the most expensive, ranging from one to tens of millions of dollars, and microprocessors are the least expensive, ranging from a few to tens of thousands of dollars. Supercomputers and mainframes are usually employed in high end, general purpose, compute intensive applications. Minicomputers and microprocessors address the same functionality, but often in more diverse roles and applications. The latter class of computers is usually more portable, because they are generally smaller in size. They are on your desktop.
