5 ms·

> Basically computers can run much faster if you use incredibly expensive or experimental materials. The major roadblock is really mass production. I'm certain

> Basically computers can run much faster if you use incredibly expensive or experimental materials. The major roadblock is really mass production. I'm certain there are black projects doing all sorts of custom hardware behind the scenes, most likely for military applications. No. The CPUs on supercomputers are basically the same as what you can purchase commercially. What distinguishes supercomputers from "the cloud" is better networking. > Single threaded performance is a huge priority because most problems we are interested in cannot be made parallel and hence do not benefit much from multicore. The few big problems very interesting to militaries are all embarassingly parallel. There are no super-secret CPUs that have better single-threaded performance than what is available commercially.

jiggawatts 6y ago
That's not entirely true. Well, it is true that you can't get better chips with much higher clocks commercially, but there are specialist vendors making digital circuitry with crazy high clock speeds, and the primary market is the military. For example, the Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) logic uses superconducting circuitry and experimental chips have hit 1 THz for simple ADC/DAC circuits, and I've heard of 100 GHz DSP chips in practical use. They're typically used for radio telescope amplifiers and digitisers, large static military radar installations, etc... People sometimes forget that the commodity market seeks a kind of Pareto Frontier optimisation where "cost effectiveness" and "low risk manufacturing" are key metrics. If you don't care about any of that and just want the maximum performance at any cost, there's some amazing technologies out there! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_single_flux_quantum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_single_flux_quantum
som33 6y ago
You can be told the facts and the figures and not reason to the right conclusion, see the science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

jiggawatts 6y ago

That's not entirely true. Well, it is true that you can't get better chips with much higher clocks commercially, but there are specialist vendors making digital circuitry with crazy high clock speeds, and the primary market is the military. For example, the Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) logic uses superconducting circuitry and experimental chips have hit 1 THz for simple ADC/DAC circuits, and I've heard of 100 GHz DSP chips in practical use. They're typically used for radio telescope amplifiers and digitisers, large static military radar installations, etc... People sometimes forget that the commodity market seeks a kind of Pareto Frontier optimisation where "cost effectiveness" and "low risk manufacturing" are key metrics. If you don't care about any of that and just want the maximum performance at any cost, there's some amazing technologies out there! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_single_flux_quantum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_single_flux_quantum

som33 6y ago

You can be told the facts and the figures and not reason to the right conclusion, see the science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ