Making a difference

Apart from providing a justification for investing in process technology – it either saves Intel a lot of money or makes it even more money, depending on your point of view – he also gave two examples of where computing power will make a difference. Medical imaging was one. Today, he claimed, even with teraflop computing power, it takes 2.5hours for an MRI image to be processed. With a petaflop processor, that processing time would be reduced to six minutes. With a 10Pflop processor, the image could be produced in just 40s. "It's only a matter of time before this technology comes into play," he asserted. But his other example was more contentious: weather forecasting. By throwing more processing power at the topic, he believed it will be possible for forecasting accuracy to be increased dramatically. With a similar application of computing power, he said weather forecasts could be produced that would tell you what the weather will be doing in two weeks and which would be accurate for a 50 mile radius. Providing more accurate weather forecasts – at least for Britons – is a risky business. Technology shouldn't interfere with what is, essentially, our national sport: we all know it will rain on the day of the village fete, no matter what the forecasters say.