At 12:00 -0500 8/7/12, Fred wrote: ...the obvious question, and one we have been over multiple times. I'm envisioning, but have nothing like the skills to create, a 3 dimensional plot. X-axis is year of introduction, Y-axis is available RAM (or equivalent quick-access memory), Z-axis is MFLOPS or suitable measure of computation throughput [1]. Dots might be color-coded by relative price, adjusted for inflation, to essentially encode a 4th dimension, but one normally correlated to Z-axis. Or one might use color for one of the other possible axes (bit width, I/O bandwidth, etc.). I suspect a surface could be constructed in that plot that would allow one to reasonably define anything above the surface to be a supercomputer, while anything below it not a supercomputer. I'm sure exceptions could be made (Distributed.net? The PlayStation 3 array?) but maybe it would cut down some on the inevitable argument. Does this already exist somewhere? I note http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PPTMooresLawai.jpg which is on the way toward what I'm thinking of. [1] Yeah, that's a whole other discussion on its own. And I have totally ignored the question of I/O capability, so there could be lots more axes on the plot. I know, it's not an easy question to answer, no brickbats please! -- - Mark 210-379-4635 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Large Asteroids headed toward planets inhabited by beings that don't have technology adequate to stop them: Think of it as Evolution in Fast-Forward.