5 ms·
For anyone curious why this doesn't translate into a 427GHz computer, light can travel about 1.4mm in one cycle at 427GHz, meaning that all synchronized compone
by burke 13y ago
For anyone curious why this doesn't translate into a 427GHz computer, light can travel about 1.4mm in one cycle at 427GHz, meaning that all synchronized components would have to be located within 1.4mm of each other. The bottleneck for processor speed became the speed of light some years ago.
- cinquemb 13y agoI wonder if some the research going on at nasa right now about FTL transportation can be applied at some point?
- burke 13y agoI doubt it. As far as I understand it, NASA's research centers around the possibility of deforming spacetime to cause an object to fall through space (sorta). Deforming spacetime wouldn't really put components closer together, or cause light to travel faster, or anything. You never know with stuff this weird though. Maybe something else will fall out of their research. It's been known to happen when pushing the boundaries of our understanding of physics.
- cinquemb 13y agoWell if you treat light like an object (if you consider its particle like properties), and deform space-time between the components (or more like deform space-time around the light, so it is of regardless where the components are in euclidean space), wouldn't that theoretically achieve the same thing as making light "move" faster between the components? Though the way I envision that the components would have be connected by or lie in some kind of vacuum. I mean, these have to be the in the family of tests NASA will have to be conducting on particles before "moving" ships through free space becomes some kind of reality, right?
- tokipin 13y agothey could be opening the very gates of hell in that lab
- Symmetry 13y agoMore to the point, between the cycles of the clock in your CPU a signal has to make it's way across a number of gates. This is usually measured in terms of the equivalent of the time it takes a transistor to drive the capacitances of 4 other transistors (FO4s). Your typical CPU these days will have between 10 to 20 FO4s of delay for each actual clock cycle.
- ssawyer06 13y agoThe speed of light isn't directly why commercially available CPUs stopped getting faster (in terms of clock speed). That's more related to the fact that the increased transistor density and thinner gates (with more leakage) have pushed power dissipation to its limits. If we clock any faster, the CPU will burn up. That's why you can overclock if you use liquid cooling, for example. That said, I'm sure there are fundamental limits to transistor clock speeds imposed by the speed of light. It's just not why CPUs stopped scaling around 2-4 GHz.
- AsymetricCom 13y agoYou can get a feel for how difficult this is to work with by building a CPU in minecraft.
- fulafel 13y agothere is no need to keep large synchronous areas though. look up clock domains and asynchronous circuits from the 90s and onwards.
- burke 13y agoFascinating, thanks.