4 ms·
It's wild to imagine that 40 or so years from now, someone will have a drawer full of cheap plastic boxes, each with more power than the fastest computing clust
by qgin 3y ago
It's wild to imagine that 40 or so years from now, someone will have a drawer full of cheap plastic boxes, each with more power than the fastest computing cluster of 2023... promising to themselves that one day they're finally going to build that hobby project with one of them.
- avg_dev 3y agosuch a dystopian future... I hope we are not still using plastic then :)
- niederman 3y agoHow is this dystopian? Plastic is a really great material -- and way more eco-friendly than metal for building computers. It's only mass-produced single-use plastics like water bottles that are bad for the environment.
- huytersd 3y agoI wish we could come up with a plastic that would biodegrade after a fixed amount of time say 200 years.
- b112 3y agoYou want the stored carbon in plastics to escape?? The best outcome for plastics, would be to bury them very deep (like nuclear waste), where they could eventually become some new oil like substance. No carbon escape.
- huytersd 3y agoYeah but no one is burying the plastic, it’s too expensive. So realistically I’d much rather have the plastic breakdown so it’s not everywhere for 10k years.
- vl 3y agoA lot of plastic actually gets buried. For example, in Washington’s King County non-recycled waste is buried. Perhaps this needs to be done world-wide.
- mdaniel 3y agoThere's no shortage of those (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1zDJ1qZTlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1zDJ1qZTlg and https://youtu.be/F2zm87p8f7M?t=1857 https://youtu.be/F2zm87p8f7M?t=1857 that I just happened to have handy) what there is a shortage of is economical ones (or scalable, the other major obstacle) as compared to the current situation where the negative externalities are not priced into the sales leading to perverse incentives
- huytersd 3y agoThat’s just biodegradable plastic. It will last a couple of days out in the open. I actually mean plastic that’s lasts for multiple lifetimes but still starts to break down only after ~200 years.
- djaychela 3y agoHow is it more eco-friendly? AFAIK Most plastics used in such applications are not practically recyclable, whereas metals are.
- ryandrake 3y agoDidn’t the Apollo guidance computer, which took people to the moon, have 4K of RAM? Today, 1 million times that barely runs the OS and a few Chrome tabs.
- jes 3y agoI hope the following from Wikipedia is helpful: The computer had 2048 words of erasable magnetic-core memory and 36,864 words of read-only core rope memory. Both had cycle times of 11.72 microseconds. The memory word length was 16 bits: 15 bits of data and one odd-parity bit. The CPU-internal 16-bit word format was 14 bits of data, one overflow bit, and one sign bit (ones' complement representation). [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
- jojobas 3y agoRussians ran computers with ferrite-plate RAM of similar size on submarines well into 90s or maybe even 00s. Still using software written for them on Kilo submarines in some sort of VMs.
- chasd00 3y agoI’ve looked inside that capsule. I wouldn’t ride in it to the grocery store!
- huytersd 3y agoYou really think so? Aren’t we at the end of Moore’s law, so I’m really doubtful that we’ll see massive leaps like that.
- aembleton 3y agoPeople have been saying that for at least twenty years
- b112 3y agoI remember people saying this in the 80s!
- RetroTechie 3y agoMoore's law will die when we have 3D stacks of silicon thick enough that even integrated liquid cooling can't keep it cool. With feature sizes measured in a few atoms. Or when economics of fabricating such structures just aren't worth it.
- jamiek88 3y agoYeah made out of not silicon. Moores ‘law’ is a human driven law. Computing is basically the absolute center of our society. As long as our civilization exists we will spend massive resources on this. Thus as long as it’s physically possible we’ll have progress.
- topspin 3y ago> Aren’t we at the end of Moore’s law Three semi manufacturers are telling their investors they'll be at 2nm (or something) in late 2024 or 2025. So no, Moore's law has not seen its end, despite ~40 years of predictions to the contrary.