Quote - How much has the Desktop computer grown in capability in 14 years?

It depends on how you look at it. If you compare a 386DX to an I7 Extreme, it is theoretically about 1800 times faster. But theory and real life show that it isn't that extreme because a lot of the supporting stuff has not sped up at the same rate. Things like hard drives, memory, and buses have not sped up anywhere near close to what processors have.

Servers have an advantage over desktops because the primary support for the processor, the ram gig per second, is far faster on a server than a desktop. They also have other advantages such as scalability. IE, 1000s of processors ganged together with massive amounts ram.

Weta Digital's server farm has about 40,000 processors.

(Thats about 4000 Blade Servers ganged together...)

Here is a quote they released on Avatar.

".....it took the Weta Digital super computers processing up to 1.4 million tasks per day to render the movie, which consisted of processing 8 gigabytes of data per second running 24 hours for over a month. Often each of Avatar’s frames took several hours to render..."

Thinking we should be able to do that now on a desktop, even a single frame, in less time with better detail is a pipe dream.

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