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I'm still digesting this interesting paper but the Figure 3 chart is particularly informative as it puts the whole aspect of electronic and optical computing in

I'm still digesting this interesting paper but the Figure 3 chart is particularly informative as it puts the whole aspect of electronic and optical computing into perspective. I cannot recall ever having seen Power Dissipation versus Compute Performance together with Total global power generation, Total global data center electricity consumption, Electronic thermal noise limit and the Landauer Limit all graphed together before. Presenting the data in this fashion provides a stark and very clear overview of what's actually possible together with the theoretical limits. Graphing the Landauer Limit is a masterstroke because we can instantly see computation vs power efficiency for any given tech. I think the visual impact of this chart is important enough to see it expanded further and the authors and/or others should think about doing so. It would make an excellent poster-sized lab wall chart if the graticule lines were subdivided from 10³ to 10 (leaving 10³ lines bold) to provide finer granularly and allow more detail of the tech together with the dates of their introduction and phase out, etc.

wiz21c 3y ago
Figure 3 is intriguing to me: I thought GPU's where order of magnitude faster than CPU (because of parallelism) and although the chart is log-scale, I don't see that. I wonder why...
- hilbert42 3y ago
  Well, I'd have said so too, but perhaps it's how they've defined the speed. GPUs are generally slower than CPUs when it comes to clock speeds, it's just that they're much faster when hundreds of them are run in parallel, it being the usual situation. You've raised a good point through, tables/charts of this type should be footnoted with definitions/conditions etc., and of necessity should only be considered high-level overviews—a bit like the Periodic Table which contains only key information about the elements. That said, I'd like to see a more precise version of this table. There are good examples to follow, one often comes across really good lab posters like this where the main chart is actually footnoted with smaller charts detailing the specifics of objects to avoid clutter and or to represent info that would otherwise have had to be projected in 3D views. Edit: incidentally, I find it annoying that so many authors of scientific papers fail to define and label graph axes properly, same with equation terms. It's all very well for professionals to resort to jargon and shorthand when talking amongst themselves (I even do it myself), as they are dealing with their subjects on a daily basis but it's a different matter in publications where papers are read by a wider audience.

wiz21c 3y ago

Figure 3 is intriguing to me: I thought GPU's where order of magnitude faster than CPU (because of parallelism) and although the chart is log-scale, I don't see that. I wonder why...

hilbert42 3y ago
Well, I'd have said so too, but perhaps it's how they've defined the speed. GPUs are generally slower than CPUs when it comes to clock speeds, it's just that they're much faster when hundreds of them are run in parallel, it being the usual situation. You've raised a good point through, tables/charts of this type should be footnoted with definitions/conditions etc., and of necessity should only be considered high-level overviews—a bit like the Periodic Table which contains only key information about the elements. That said, I'd like to see a more precise version of this table. There are good examples to follow, one often comes across really good lab posters like this where the main chart is actually footnoted with smaller charts detailing the specifics of objects to avoid clutter and or to represent info that would otherwise have had to be projected in 3D views. Edit: incidentally, I find it annoying that so many authors of scientific papers fail to define and label graph axes properly, same with equation terms. It's all very well for professionals to resort to jargon and shorthand when talking amongst themselves (I even do it myself), as they are dealing with their subjects on a daily basis but it's a different matter in publications where papers are read by a wider audience.