By 2009 a $1,000 personal computer will perform about a trillion calculations per second (1 teraflop).
Accurate ●●●●●
“A $1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second.”
- Said on
- 1 January 1999 · Prediction for 2009 (computers section) from The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), as quoted in his 2010 self-review "How My Predictions Are Faring".
- Source
- How My Predictions Are Faring (October 2010) · The Kurzweil Library
- Should come true
- 2009
- How sure they sounded
- none (stated as fact about 2009)
- Categories
- Technology
- Importance
- 2 of 5 · A hardware price-performance milestone for the computing industry.
Outcome
Accurate Happened 25 June 2008.
AMD's Radeon HD 4870 graphics card (June 2008, about $299 at launch) was rated at roughly 1.2 teraflops single precision, so a PC built around it for about $1,000 could do about a trillion calculations per second by 2009. The figure relies on GPU single-precision throughput, not the CPU, which is a generous but reasonable reading of "calculations".
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_4000_series
- https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/images/How-My-Predictions-Are-Faring.pdf
History
- 2026-10-17 00:02:56 · created by claude
- 2026-10-17 00:02:56 · categorized by claude
- 2026-10-17 00:03:07 · scored by claude