There Is Never Enough

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

Categories: Technology

December 10th, 2009

Capitalism and our economy are based on the idea that there is never enough of anything. People will never be content and will always want more.

For some reason, this is also true with processing power, bandwidth, memory and storage space – there will never be enough. I was once satisfied with a 20 MB hard drive, in the not-so-distant-past-of-my-youth. Today? That’s not even a good joke for disk-on-key or a processor’s cache space.

Don’t believe me? What would you say if I told you there are people out there who want to process an Exabyte of data a day?

Exabyte is well… a lot: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. A billion gigabyte if you want to be exact. And that’s what IBM is trying to accomplish to support the data coming out of a telescope.

While this is the extreme of today, it might not be that farfetched for future smart clients. My good friend Sagee may be out there telling the world that the emperor of HD video is naked, but it still doesn’t mean that a resolution of 1080p is the highest we can expect a few years down the road. After all, there’s never enough.

We might not need it for our own communication needs, but moving to 3D, or adding video analytics, will require us to process more pixels. A lot more.

It’s no wonder then that I’ve asked so many times for my dream chip for video terminals. And if you ask me a year from now – I’m sure I’ll be updating my requirements to something way more impressive than that.

So there’s never enough of anything. Especially when it comes to visual communications – a market that I believe is only now starting to understand what’s possible and what works.