a similar point is made here - http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
scroll down to the third diagram, which has the caption: The big freeze. From 1960 to 1990 the cost of computers used in AI research declined, as their numbers dilution absorbed computer- efficiency gains during the period, and the power available to individual AI programs remained almost unchanged at 1 MIPS, barely insect power. AI computer cost bottomed in 1990, and since then power has doubled yearly, to several hundred MIPS by 1998. andrew [...] > But Moore's Law is about price-performance, not absolute performance; > here I estimate that the actual loss of price-performance attributable > to bad CPU architectures is perhaps a factor of 10 to 50, and it is > plausible that better compilers can remedy this. [...]
