3 ms·
Rod logic will not be faster than electronic computers. According to Drexler's thesis, it's reasonable to expect "that RISC machines implemented with this techn
by gene-h 5y ago
Rod logic will not be faster than electronic computers. According to Drexler's thesis, it's reasonable to expect "that RISC machines implemented with this technology base can achieve clock speeds of ~ 1 GHz, executing instructions at ~ 1000 MIPS."
This is because the speed of sound, which limits how fast mechanical signals can propagate, is much lower than the speed of light.
The main advantages of rod logic is that its compact and power efficient. The aforementioned CPU would consume ~100 nW.
Really the reason why Drexler analyzed rod logic in the first place is that it was easy to analyze and something that his proposed assemblers could plausibly construct, better alternatives for fast computing may exist.
[0]https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/27999 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/27999
- nynx 5y agoThis is true, but it's important to consider that you could squeeze several billion of these processors into the space taken up by current CPUs.
- webmaven 5y ago> This is true, but it's important to consider that you could squeeze several billion of these processors into the space taken up by current CPUs. You're implying that parallelization can make up for the slower clock speeds, which is true but only for some workloads, and then the system is constrained by bandwidth to get instructions and data to the parallel cores as fast as possible.