- #DESCRIBE TREND IN GRAPH EXPONENTIAL GROWTH DRIVER#
- #DESCRIBE TREND IN GRAPH EXPONENTIAL GROWTH FULL#
Positive values indicate an increase in prices since 1997, and negative values represent a price decline. In the chart shown we see the price changes in goods and services in the United States from 1997-2017, measured as the percentage price change since 1997. The implication of this rapid simultaneous improvement in quality and decrease of the product price is that, according to a detailed discussion on reddit ( here), a current laptop (May 2013) has about the same computing power as the most powerful computer on earth in the mid 1990s. One could also view the previous graph as a function of price instead of calculations per second in this view you would find an exponentially decreasing price for a given product quality over 110 years. It is an insightful way of understanding that the computer age really is the successor to the Industrial Revolution. The extension of the time frame also makes clear how our modern computers evolved.
#DESCRIBE TREND IN GRAPH EXPONENTIAL GROWTH DRIVER#
It is especially insightful if one wants to understand how technological progress mattered as a driver of social change. This graph shows the computer power that consumers could purchase for a price of $1000. What he found is that Moore did not only make a valid prediction of the future, but his description is also valid for the past! The exponential growth rate that Moore picked up in the 1960s was driving technological progress since the beginning of the century. He not only analyzed the improvements of integrated circuits but also looked at the predecessors – earlier transistors, vacuum tubes, relays and electromechanical computers. For this reason, it is interesting to look at both the product quality and the price. The author and inventor Ray Kurzweil analyzed the change of price and quality for computing machines since 1900. But if the technologically-advanced products are prohibitively expensive then they can only have a limited impact on the whole society. Increasing computational power – and increasing product quality – matters indeed more than a mere doubling of transistors. Since 2008, we have seen a dramatic decline in the cost of sequencing, allowing us to now produce more than 133 million base pairs per US$. In the early 2000s, we could sequence in the order of hundreds of base pairs per US$. This can also be observed in another way: in this chart, we have plotted the number of human genome base pairs which can be sequenced for one US$. Nonetheless, this rapid decline in cost is also observed in prices for the sequencing of a complete human genome.
#DESCRIBE TREND IN GRAPH EXPONENTIAL GROWTH FULL#
This is because some redundant sequence coverage would be necessary to complete and assemble the full genome. Note that this costing refers to the price of raw base pairs of DNA sequence the cost of producing the full human genome is higher than the sum of 30 million base pairs would suggest. This initial discovery and determination of the human genome sequence was a crucial injection point in the field of DNA sequencing.Īs reported by the NHGRI Genome Sequencing Program (GSP), the cost of sequencing DNA bases has fallen dramatically (more than 700,000-fold) since the completion of the first sequencing project. 5 The Human Genome Project (HGP), which aimed to determine and map the complete set of nucleotide base pairs which make up human DNA (which total more than three billion) ran over 13 years from 1990-2003. Note the logarithmic vertical axis chosen to show the linearity of the growth rate. The line corresponds to exponential growth with the transistor count doubling every two years.Īnother example which demonstrates this non-linear progress is the field of human genome DNA sequencing. 2Īs our large updated graph here shows, he was not only right about the next ten years but astonishingly the regularity he found is true for more than half a century now. As you can see, Moore had only seven observations from 1959 until 1965, but he predicted a continuing growth saying, “There is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years”.
1 Below you find the famous little graph that Moore published in 1965. The law was described as early as 1965 by the Intel co-founder Gordon E. Below I will show how aspects as diverse as processing speed, product price, memory capacity, and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras have also been progressing exponentially.
This aspect of technological progress is important as the capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore’s Law.
Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.