When will an IBM Watson-like computer cost less than $1000?
Watson is: "Powered by 10 racks of IBM POWER 750 servers running Linux, using 15 terabytes of RAM, 2,880 processor cores and is capable of operating at 80 teraflops."3 Answers
Michał Strojnowski, PhD, computer science researcher1 vote by Jarrod CugleyThis actually can be predicted with fairly high accuracy. Performance development of computing power per $ shows stable trend of doubling every 14 months (see top500.org). Hardware vendors predict that this trend will continue for at least next two decades. In 2011 Watson hardware costs about $1million, so it will cost less than a $1000 around 2023. There is also a question about software cost, because it is very likely that in 12 years this software will be obsolete and no longer supported, replaced with something much more sophisticated (and computation-costly).Joe Talin1 vote by Richard H. SchwartzIn reality , there's no need for a personal watson computer. You just need answers. So i think a better way to measure watson's price is not price per system , but price per result ,i.e. price per answer.According to some calculations[1], today it costs watson around $2.84 to answer a question(assuming Watson works at full capacity), using the IBM system.
Using amazon's cloud computing plaform it would go down to about $1.5 per question.
And if you build your own, it would get to around $0.5 per question. And that's before software and hardware optimization that could rapidly decrease the price.
And just for perspective , According to [2], google's revenue per query is $0.2.
[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item...
[2]http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/w...James William Murdock IV, IBM Researcher: Watson (Jeopardy!)Michal's comment makes a lot of reasonable points. However, I am very skeptical of any predictions that far into the future. Also, I think a more important point with the cost of Watson, is the possibility that software improvements could reduce the computational requirements of Watson and thus make it cost-effective much sooner. In many cases, it is possible for clever software to compensate for the limits of a hardware platform. Even if it is not possible to completely implement every function of Watson on a less powerful platform, it may be possible to create a version that has many of the important functions and provides similar capabilities with much less demand on the computational hardware.
via quora.com
