Thursday, September 28, 2006 Ng: Overseas Filipinos By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
I AM writing this in a hotel in Washington DC. I am part of an information and communication technology (ICT) mission to promote Cebu as an ICT hub.
We have been to Los Angeles and San Francisco and now Washington DC. The trip is coordinated with the trade attaches and consulates in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington DC. It has been great meeting many Filipinos here.
A month ago, I was in Beijing, and one of the top Chinese officials said something that struck me — the jewel of the Chinese economy was not only its huge population, but actually its huge overseas Chinese population whose number has gone past 35 million.
If China has a population of 1.3 billion and an overseas population of 35 million (about 2.6 percent), and India has a population of over a billion with an overseas sector of another 22 million or so (about 2.2 percent ), then nobody beats the Philippines in terms of migration with a population of 85 million, yet with an estimated 12 million overseas (about 15 percent). That makes the Filipinos the largest migrant population in the world.
And if overseas Indians and Chinese are instrumental in making their respective economies soar, then the same goes for the Philippine economy with growing remittances from overseas Filipino workers.
But we can do more — overseas Filipinos can actually be ambassadors of goodwill as well as bring investments back to the Philippines. I think this notion is increasingly being recognized.
We met about 100 overseas Filipinos in the three cities, many of whom were representatives of various Filipino organizations. We hope that all of them will be instrumental in helping spread the word — that the Philipines and Cebu, in particular, is becoming an increasingly good site for ICT services.
One of the things that were particularly encouraging is that there are many Filipinos that are enjoying high level success overseas. We have talked to several Filipinos who are high up in the IMF and the World Bank.
We talked to several Filipinos who are controllers, vice presidents and managing directors of multi-billion dollar organizations. We also met up with a Filipino who has a thriving semi-conductor equipment business in the last eight years in Silicon Valley.
We also met with Filipinos who are getting multi-million dollar contracts from the Pentagon. We proved to ourselves that it is simply untrue that Filipinos cannot go up the corporate ladder.
INTEL CORE DUO. By the way, one of the often repeated mantras in the processor industry is that computer speed doubles roughly around every two years. This is really very fast growth, but the outstanding thing is that it may grow even faster than that.
Intel has recently released the core duo, which is actually having the equivalent of two processors in one chip. Intel has announced that it may have quad core processors before the end of the year.
By the first half of next year, Intel may release core two quad processors, which actually is almost eight processors in a single chip.
But the ultimate goal, as envisioned by Intel’s terascale research prototype, is to enable a trillion floating-point operations per second —a teraflop— on a single chip, which Intel expects to do in five years.
If you want a point of comparison, 10 years ago, the ASCI Red supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories became the first supercomputer to deliver one teraflop using 4,510 computing nodes.
This means that by around 2011, we will all have the capability to have on our desktop (with just a single chip) probably the same computing speed as the fastest supercomputer back in 1995 (with 4,500 nodes)!
What do we do with that speed? Well, I’m sure applications will advance, and we will have a new round of user power and experience that will allow us to have radically better experience with the computer.
