Moore's Law Strikes Again

Came across an interesting thought today on one of the cluster mailing lists I am on:

There’s a well known example where you have a “really big problem” that you could either spend some money now, and compute for the next two years, or save your money, wait a year, buy the (twice as fast) computers for the same price and do the computation then, finishing at the same time.

Plus, it’s cheaper! You are spending less valuable future dollars and the cost of the hardware would probably have dropped a bit by then as well.

(ps — to fend off potential pedants: Yes, I know that Moore’s law says that transistor count, not processor speed, would continue to increase at an exponential rate.)