ier. Today's com-
et of operations or
ical rendering,
juires both.
re needed to man-
red and processed.
sabytes, images
re, while multi-
gigabytes of out-
sed or reformatted,
to be stored.
M, memory, is
g. At a minimum,
ed display must be
ex cases, such as in
| time sequence or
d, a substantial dis-
ptable screen
creens add to the
| Screens with a
st handle 4 times
uired for network
graphical images.
| 50 megabyte file
to transmit over a
>, 2 hours over a 56
s over a T1 (1.5
econds over a high
cond) lines. Image
sed from 4 - 40 to 1
y be much less than
s remain constant.
cs adapters are
ntation. True color
8 bits per color
' in 16.77 million
dapter which
tween 0 and 255.
important in image
1 is dependent on
images that have
been reduced to 256 colors offer less discrimina-
tion.
Figure 1 illustrates the growth in these
hardware technologies and relative cost per unit
over the 1983-1994 period. The trend has clearly
been positive for the technologies essential to
spatial processing of heterogenous data
1000X |— —
100X |—
10X 7
1X
1983 (1X) 1993
- DRAM MB /$
- Color display pixels / $
- Storage GB / $
- Uniprocessor MIPS
- Communications bandwidth
Figure 1. Relative improvements in
hardware technologies: 1983-1993
In the workstation arena UNIX perfor-
mance has been growing by 2X every 18 months
while the price per megabyte for storage has
been falling at approximately 20% per year for
the past five years. 1995 prices vary from.33
cents to 90 cents per megabyte, depending on the
access media. Further there is every expectation
that this trend will continue for at least another
five years before any radical change in technol-
ogy is required to extend the technological limits
of computing.
Figures 2, 3 and 4 give some additional
historical information along with an outlook on
computer chip technology, the key to high speed
processing.
Bits per Chip A
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000
Figure 2. History and outlook on the
number of bits contained in a single
computer chip
100M
10M
IM
100K
10K
1K
— Transistors per Chip ^
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000
Figure 3. History and outlook on the
number of transistors contained in a
single computer chip
