[tim333]

That Kurzweil plot is a bit ancient, up to 1998 or something

There's a better one that goes to 2023 https://www.bvp.com/assets/uploads/2024/03/Price_Computation...

The rate of progress is more like the Moore's law 18 month doubling. That's compute per dollar rather than Moore's transistor density.

I think 10x per year is a bit questionable - it's way out of line with the Kurzweil trend.

[LegionMammal978]

Yeah, price performance definitely seems to be the more important metric here. Anyone can get more compute by building a bigger and more expensive chip, but per-dollar metrics can't be gamed so easily. Though even in that plot, it's only doubled every ~2.3 years since 2008.

(I'd be especially interested in amortized price performance, i.e., the number of useful computations from a system over its lifetime, divided by the total cost to build, maintain, and operate it. That's going to be the ultimate constraint on what you can do with a given amount of funding.)