3 ms·

i don't believe in physical limits for computation since beginning of 90ties when i read about 50MHz being the fundamental impossible to surpass limit and few y

by trhway 5y ago

i don't believe in physical limits for computation since beginning of 90ties when i read about 50MHz being the fundamental impossible to surpass limit and few years later i had DX4-133 running at home. Saying that with high appreciation for the grit of the people in the industry who has taken us that far and going to take even farther.

sigstoat 5y ago
> i don't believe in physical limits for computation there are limits, we're just not close to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation > when i read about 50MHz being the fundamental impossible to surpass limit yeah i think the problem here is popular press writing
- trhway 5y ago
  some of those limits are applicable to black holes only in the state of thermodynamic equilibrium. The miniature unstable black holes/singularities produced using quark-gluon lithography may be not a subject to those limits, and miniature wormhole loops through 4th dimension may prove to be an effective workaround for storage limits, etc.
  - comboy 5y ago
    If you have some good points to disprove Heisenberg's rule then it's worth publishing a paper. If you are talking about quark litography (which does not physically make any sense as af as I can tell), then you are still agreeing with the parent comment, there are limits but we still have a long way.
  - sigstoat 5y ago
    i hope that any of that has any bearing on engineering practice in our lifetimes.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zsmi 5y ago
> beginning of 90ties when i read about 50MHz being the fundamental impossible to surpass limit Do you remember what magazine that was in? It's hard to imagine anyone thinking 50MHz was a fundamental limit to circuit design, or computers, in the 90s. I am very curious what their argument was. The Cray-1 ran 80MHz in the 70s. http://www.openloop.com/education/classes/sjsu_engr/engr_compOrg/spring2002/studentProjects/Andie_Hioki/Cray1withAdd.htm http://www.openloop.com/education/classes/sjsu_engr/engr_com... FM is faster than that and it's been around a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcast_band https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcast_band
- trhway 5y ago
  it was in USSR, so there would have been natural delay in the stuff getting printed there, and also it may have been end of 80-ties. My point here isn't about specific numbers and dates, it is that relatively short period between me reading about the limit and experiencing it getting broken left me with big doubts about the limits, and made me thinking about them more as the limits of our world view and less as real physical limits. Similar like "c" happens to be a speed limit only in the fixed spacetime.
tasty_freeze 5y ago
> when i read about 50MHz being the fundamental impossible to surpass limit Where did you read that? As a working EE through the 80s and until today, I never heard that claimed. Maybe someone, somewhere wrote that, but it would have been an extremely fringe opinion. Even at the time I think most people would have received that opinion as a crock of shit.
jacquesm 5y ago
The 50 MHz limit had to do with spreading a synchronous clock across the longest dimension of a motherboard. By splitting the on-chip and off-chip clocks out we managed to get much higher clockrates (across much shorter distances). It's often the details that matter a lot with such statements and if a metric is presented without context then you can easily stray into territory where such statements are no longer necessarily valid, even though in principle they carry a core of truth. In practice the only real fundamental limit to how fast you can clock a processor has to do with the gate rise and fall times, which are in turn intimately coupled to how large those gates are (the main factor in determining their capacitance) and the resistance in the charging circuitry for the gate. This is essentially an RLC network where all of the dominant factors are parasitic. What the real practical limits are is as of yet unknown but you always have to keep in mind is that this is tech at the cutting edge and that what is impossible today may very well a breakthrough away from being common.

by trhway 5y ago

sigstoat 5y ago

> i don't believe in physical limits for computation there are limits, we're just not close to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation > when i read about 50MHz being the fundamental impossible to surpass limit yeah i think the problem here is popular press writing

trhway 5y ago
some of those limits are applicable to black holes only in the state of thermodynamic equilibrium. The miniature unstable black holes/singularities produced using quark-gluon lithography may be not a subject to those limits, and miniature wormhole loops through 4th dimension may prove to be an effective workaround for storage limits, etc.
- comboy 5y ago
  If you have some good points to disprove Heisenberg's rule then it's worth publishing a paper. If you are talking about quark litography (which does not physically make any sense as af as I can tell), then you are still agreeing with the parent comment, there are limits but we still have a long way.
- sigstoat 5y ago
  i hope that any of that has any bearing on engineering practice in our lifetimes.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

zsmi 5y ago

> beginning of 90ties when i read about 50MHz being the fundamental impossible to surpass limit Do you remember what magazine that was in? It's hard to imagine anyone thinking 50MHz was a fundamental limit to circuit design, or computers, in the 90s. I am very curious what their argument was. The Cray-1 ran 80MHz in the 70s. http://www.openloop.com/education/classes/sjsu_engr/engr_compOrg/spring2002/studentProjects/Andie_Hioki/Cray1withAdd.htm http://www.openloop.com/education/classes/sjsu_engr/engr_com... FM is faster than that and it's been around a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcast_band https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcast_band

trhway 5y ago
it was in USSR, so there would have been natural delay in the stuff getting printed there, and also it may have been end of 80-ties. My point here isn't about specific numbers and dates, it is that relatively short period between me reading about the limit and experiencing it getting broken left me with big doubts about the limits, and made me thinking about them more as the limits of our world view and less as real physical limits. Similar like "c" happens to be a speed limit only in the fixed spacetime.

tasty_freeze 5y ago

> when i read about 50MHz being the fundamental impossible to surpass limit Where did you read that? As a working EE through the 80s and until today, I never heard that claimed. Maybe someone, somewhere wrote that, but it would have been an extremely fringe opinion. Even at the time I think most people would have received that opinion as a crock of shit.

jacquesm 5y ago

The 50 MHz limit had to do with spreading a synchronous clock across the longest dimension of a motherboard. By splitting the on-chip and off-chip clocks out we managed to get much higher clockrates (across much shorter distances). It's often the details that matter a lot with such statements and if a metric is presented without context then you can easily stray into territory where such statements are no longer necessarily valid, even though in principle they carry a core of truth. In practice the only real fundamental limit to how fast you can clock a processor has to do with the gate rise and fall times, which are in turn intimately coupled to how large those gates are (the main factor in determining their capacitance) and the resistance in the charging circuitry for the gate. This is essentially an RLC network where all of the dominant factors are parasitic. What the real practical limits are is as of yet unknown but you always have to keep in mind is that this is tech at the cutting edge and that what is impossible today may very well a breakthrough away from being common.