General Technology Trends
- Microprocessor performance increases 50% - 100% per year
- Transistor count doubles every 3 years
- DRAM size quadruples every 3 years
- Huge investment per generation is carried by huge commodity market
- Note that single-processor performance is plateauing, but that parallelism is a natural way to improve it.
Sequential or small multiprocessors -- today 2 processor PC’s