There have been a few famous quotes on the subject – how much memory do you really need; how many GHz is enough; how much storage to hold all the books in the world; how many personal computers are enough for planet earth (let alone a single family), etc., etc. - I’ll stay away from predicting the future and just talk about what I need today.
2 THz processor
I need a 2THz processor. It took me 5 hours (300 minutes) to encode a family video to MP4 (H.264 720p) on a dual-core 2.66GHz machine. It is reasonable to want this to take just a few minutes (around the time it takes to burn an audio CD today) so that I could grab a video, throw some clips together, and encode the clips in an afternoon before dinner.
100 GB of RAM
Remember the days when large digital images could not fit in RAM? I would like my 5GB of video to fit in RAM – maybe two or three of them – comfortably – while editing the video. 100GB should be enough (for today). Speed up disk transfer, network, etc. by 100x or 1000x while we’re at it so we can push all this data around easier.
Petabyte Hard Drive
We need a place to store all these bits. A Petabyte would be a good starting point. While it is true that all of the emails, financial data, and other digital records I have can fit on a $20 8Gb flash card, and the music collections of everyone in the house combined add up to less than 100 Gb, we still have a cabinet full of DVD disks and nearly zero video digitally encoded and stored on the computers. Kind of like our audio data was some years ago.
Final Thoughts
Just sticking with what I need today – right now – I came up with these numbers. But I’m stuck with just a few GHz of cycles, a few Gb of ram, and a few Tb of storage. And I’ll be heating up the computer room for 5 hours at a clip with fans on high and CPU’s pegged at 100%.
We still have a long way to go.