The bright side is that, indeed, “supercomputing” (please define) has never been so affordable.

On the other hand, the dark side is to see how devastated is now what used to be the workstation market (which itself depleted the minis who feeded on the mainframes).

What this article is telling me, is that it is so depleted a market that it has to be addressed by academics engaging their students in hobbyist activities like they did in the pre PC era with the Acorn!

This is just to say that we are not really ramping up in Mips to Exaflops as quickly as possible, since the main (i.e. most competitive and innovative) market is centered on a sliding downsizing window. Today’s real competition is not really on CPU anymore but on SOC for smartphones and tablets and the rest of the market is kind of fossilized, alas, except, maybe for the transversal GPU market.

This is one bleak perspective Kurzweil didn’t foretell with his $1000 PC computing power metric he consistently used from year 2000 to the putative singularity.

The main reason for this phenomenon is the capitalist intrinsic logic. Once a market segment has been thoroughly addressed, soon enough it becomes saturated, hence the pressure to open new outlets for cheaper and cheaper devices (a quasi automatic phenomenon as the items are commoditized with lower and lower marginal cost).

We are addressing now the relatively untapped low price consumer market.

As the smartphone market will become saturated itself, the competition/innovation will concentrate on the next downsizing iteration: wearable computing, then ubiquitous computing and actually internally wearable computing when the younger generation, already accustomed to piercings and various neotribal body decorations, will adopt internal computing with micro surgical operations to “install” the devices.

On the other hand, looking back at what is behind the downsizing tide, the spectacle is not very enticing. Supercomputing had become very unimaginative, just piles of racks of xxxx lame PC servers. There is no minis segment anymore but a lesser pile of racks of xxx lame PC servers and the power user segment (workstations) is now fully neglected (oh, well yes, you name it with this rack of xx lame PC servers).

I don’t care of the power gamer PC niche and their shooting games with ever more realistic blood and body fluid splashs. Instead, I would like to see the heirs of Steve Jobs presenting along the iPhone5 an ambitious power user machine, mutatis mutandis, a 2012 $10’000 NeXT (Gosh, this very decorative NeXT cube I’m looking right now is already 22 years old). Of course forget it, this is so passé!

In 2020, my bleak prediction is that the PC segment will be fossilized too as the average people and software developers are not creative enough to really tap the teraflops (and soon enough the petaflops) at their disposal.
But chicks will be very fond of their wearable buds speaking the hour on a light touch, talking birds deployed at home as light alarms and a paraphernalia of gadgetry mixing jewelry with kitsch and recreative computing.

And yes, this is too long for a comment, sorry.