1375015
story
solferino writes:
"Assume engineering genius continues to allow Moore's law to hold. What are the absolute computing limits of a 1kg laptop computer as defined by the physical laws of the universe? A New Scientist article has some interesting answers."
Hotter computers = noisier computers. (Score:1)
mac airport & bluetooth (Score:1)
The limit is coming soon!! (Score:1)
From the introduction to the article on the New Scientist homepage, I guess this means that the Pentium 4 will come in a colored case.
Re:CAN'T resist (Score:1)
Re:be careful... (Score:1)
Simple... just feed the black hole more matter!
Yes, it's true folks. (Score:1)
Re:Reversible computing (Score:1)
let you measure time with infinite
precision if you got infinite energy.
Time is also a complicated variable
because it is part of Minkowski metric
for our Universe, so it is essential
to relativity. The article is right in
pointing out that their numbers would
be worth discussing once GUT is around
and people fully understand the nature of
singularities (e.g. black holes).
Re:well (Score:1)
Re:Reversible computing (Score:1)
This brings up an even more disturbing questions. To wit: if one builds a relational database system based on these ideas, and one runs across errors when committing one's transactions, how does one roll back the changes? And, in reference to a previous article [slashdot.org], if one is computing using negative energy, would one roll back their changes when they wanted to commit and commit when they wanted to roll back?
Would Informix error message be positive?
How would Microsoft handle the fact that in certain compilers they define True as equal to -1 and False as not equal to true?
We may need a new brance of science to deal with these issues. Maybe MS can come up with certifications such as MCPI (Microsoft Certified Physics Instructor). This could very well be bigger than the Y2K fiasco.
--
Re:Hot (Score:2)
Re:What's with Kevin Costner and baseball movies? (Score:1)
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
Re:What kind of battery? (Score:1)
I see packs of lith-ion AAs in my local hardware store for sale.. I think it was bout $12 for a pack of 4. Ouch.
Re:(OT) Dumb Technical Question (Score:1)
And where in the laptop case do you plan to fit the PII heatsink and fan?
Re:What would Dirac say? (Score:2)
What would a Beowulf cluster of these look like?
well (Score:3)
Re:Please, people (Score:1)
Of course, they've been slowly radiating all the time, but the actual explosion takes a long time in human terms.
Re:this answer will self destruct in 10^-51 second (Score:1)
"And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
And there was light-
Hehe, Asimov rules.
Re:Hotter computers = noisier computers. (Score:1)
Oh . . . excuse me . . . gotta go . . . I think an UltraSparc just landed . .
Re:Interesting Article, but is it useful? (Score:2)
Sorry to be OT, but I replied to the SynthesizerOS [slashdot.org] thread and I'd love for you to take a look. I was sick last week, so it took a while ;)
so... (Score:1)
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
More Than Twenty-Thousands !! (Score:1)
You said:
"However thousands of such events occur
every second in any living organism"
Actually, the answer is over twenty thousand such events occur every second in every living CELL of that living organism.
That's pretty amazing, isn't it ?!
hmm? (Score:2)
Seem's like an added appendix to Making the Macintosh 1.0 [slashdot.org], soon to be renamed Breaking the Macintosh 7.5.5. . .
:)
/nutt
Actually .... (Score:1)
Thank you for providing the two links to the two interesting articles. But in actuality, I have read a related article LONG TIME AGO, something like in the late 80's, where someone speculated that the universe originally contained 22 dimentions, and some of them collapsed (for the lack of a better word) not long after the big bang. That leaves us with something like 14 dimensions, and four of which we are living in.
Re:Some Perspective (Score:1)
I am now running a fantastic amount of server-level stuff on my old 486DX/25 with 28Mb RAM. The fact is, 20 years ago you'd have killed for that 486 to run your entire business on.
Re:(OT) Dumb Technical Question (Score:1)
The REAL question on everyone's mind is... (Score:1)
ONLY 200 years away (Score:1)
Back of the envelope nanocomputer numbers. (Score:5)
In case anyone else is as bored as I was, here are the calculations and the numbers:
- Assume, arbitrarily, that your device is made of carbon and has one computing element (gate or memory element) per 10 atoms, average. This gives a total of about (1000 / (12 * 10)) * 6e23 = 5e24 computing elements.
- Assume that we're going for floating-point performance, and are using most of our elements for multiplication units. Assume we're cheating and using single-precision ints (32 bits). If we're allowed to pipeline arbitrarily deeply (we're runnign a toy benchmark program), then it would take somewhere in the realm of 4000 computing elements to build an IEEE-compliant floating point multiplier. This gives us 5e24/4000 = 1.25e21 multiplication units operating in parallel.
- Assume that we're signalling using light and that the light has to travel 1 nm per clock (we're very good at routing traces). This gives a clock frequency of 3e8/1e-9 = 3e17 Hz.
- This gives us a total of 1.25e21 x 3e17 = 3.75e38 FLOPS. Less than the best, but still not too shabby.
For kicks, let's compute the power requirements of this device.
- Assume that on every clock, half of the computation units change state (we're managing to use all of the computation units all of the time, with random data). This gives 5e24 / 2 = 2.5e24 transitions per clock.
- This gives 2.5e24 * 3e17 = 7.5e41 transitions per second.
- Assume that each transiton costs about 5 eV in total (split this however you like). This gives 5 eV * 1.6e-19 J/eV = 8e-19 Joules per transition.
- This gives us a power dissipation of 6e23 watts. A bit power-hungry.
For kicks, let's compute the surface temperature of this computer assuming radiative cooling:
- Assume that our computer is a 10-cm cube, with a density comparable to that of water (this is strangely-structured carbon). This gives us a surface area of 6e-2 square metres.
- Radiative energy emission from the object will therefore be equal to 6e-2 * 5.67e-8 * T^4 = 3.46e-9 * T^4 watts, where T is the object's surface temperature.
- For a power dissipation of 6e23 watts, the object's surface temperture would be (6e23 / 3.46e-9) ^ (1/4) = 1.15e8 degrees Kelvin. A bit warm.
Summary of data for the best possible nanotech computer:
Looks like we'd have to underclock this baby.
Derivation of computing power for a comparably-sized quantum computer is left as an exercise for the reader.
In practice, we'd probably wind up building our nanocomputers as thin films with a lot less computing power but far lower power dissipation. Possibly as nano-grains, also, depending on application.
Re:What would Dirac say? (Score:2)
Of course then there is this: In the beginning there was the computer. And God said ... [terindell.com]
Who Needs Black Holes??? (Score:1)
Re:interesting article, frivolous physics (Score:2)
Actually if you follow links from the article about hte Cray for sale... That did some protein folding calculations.
Do I think my laptop runs hot (Score:1)
Forget those fancy PIII's on laptops, marvel at my 8 hour battery life.
Re:this answer will self destruct in 10^-51 second (Score:1)
I was just going from ancient memories of some short story I read ages ago. Isaac Asimov meant whatever he meant. I don't know if I remembered it right or not, but there was probably something in there about how it was predicting what would happen if the cops didn't intervene beforehand.
I didn't think it was worth mentioning at the time.
===
Re:this answer will self destruct in 10^-51 second (Score:1)
Re:Where can I get one of these? (Score:1)
I imagine the author means 1000 parallel single bit operations, given that the rest of the time he is counting single bits. Doesn't sound too outrageous. Think four-way superscalar on a 64 bit architecture + floating point calcs in one clock, and you can easily get over 500 bits of data changing in a single cycle. And we're only really talking order of magnitude stuff here anyway, so its close enough...
lunch box/laptop (Score:3)
Re:interesting article, frivolous physics (Score:1)
wow, that's lots better than the rant I was going to write. We don't know how the universe works... we just have a model. Also, the article assumes that the computation is digital. Quantum entaglement resolves some problems in constant time which are hard to solve digitally. And we may (read, probably will if we survive long) devise other forms of computation yet.
oh yeah... and those stupid comparisons... "10^20 times as much storage as a 10Gig HDD" and "10^39 times as fast as a 500MHZ laptop of today" are totally useless figures. If someone can't imagine how much 10^51 is, what good is changing it to 10^39 * 500mhz? Like the summary I saw on the news about the ford/firestone recall: "6 million tires have been recalled. If piled on atop the other, they would make a stack the height of the empire state building.... over 3000 times." WTF good does that do? blah blah... X is a gazillion-kajillion. That's the same as a zillion-zillion-zillion sets of one-hundred-million! pfffbt.
Neat story.
Re:Do I think my laptop runs hot (Score:1)
Interesting Article, but is it useful? (Score:1)
The computer would be interesting for super computers, but never for anything else. I don't see anyone walking around with a nuclear accident waiting to happen. But a super computer would be something else. The specified input and output would work in that enviroment. After all most people who work on super computers don't sit at the console. And if I remember correctly the console is usually burried so deep in the cases that it never sees the light of day unless someone digs into it to help it boot up. But then I've only heard of them, never even seen or worked with a super computer.
Having a laptop like this might be fun though, as a practical joke.
'Hey Joe you're computer's not working right'
'it isn't?'
'it hasn't vaporized the desk yet. You need a hotter computer.'
1 kg = ~0.5 lbs. (Score:1)
ultimate end (Score:1)
Moore's law only works on the condition that society does not collapse any time soon,
if people are going to be messing with nuclear and black hole computers, we probly wont be around long enough to play with these hot toys
still i wouldn't mind my little own black hole, ....
and i though my tower took up a lot of energy....
Re:Please, people (Score:1)
1. Hawking radiation is not a "rather slow phenomenon". The rate of radiation is inversely proportional to the size of the black hole. Huge black holes radiate very slowly. Small black holes radiate like mad.
2. It's not "merely kicked around in order to explain away why we're not constantly colliding with microscopic black holes left over from the big bang", it's neccessary to save a damn number of conservation laws from the waste bin.
Re:Reversible computing (Score:1)
You don't. You loose some energy in outputing the result, the rest can be reversed. Of course, this is in the thermodynamic limit, ie an infinitesinally slow calculation. If you want an answer within your lifetime, you have to spend a bit more energy :)
See something like the "Feynman Lectures on Computation" for a readable summary of this stuff.
Oops... {humor} (Score:1)
Re:I can see it now! (Score:1)
Jeff Noon stuff? (Score:1)
Infinite memory (Score:2)
Apparently, infinite information can be stored in a single atom -- no joke. Check out this this EETimes article [eetimes.com] -- link courtesy of ArsTechnica.
Summary: Philip Bucksbaum from the University of Michigan has stored and retrieved eight bits of information from the quantum-phase of a single cesium atom. Theoretically, there is no limit on capacity.
Re:What would Dirac say? (Score:3)
If this is true and the universe is just a huge computer used in a huge calculation (who's answer is obviously 42) than just think of the uptime! Script kiddiez and administrators across the world will no longer be shoving record uptime's in each others face when god comes down and utters:
12:59AM, up 10 billion years+, 6,067 million users, load average: 2.23, 1.23, 1.20
Geoff
Hot? Try a 100MHz 486! (Score:2)
It had a 486DX4-100MHz processor, and...let's just say that I couldn't use it for more than half an hour without putting a pillow or book between it and my leg. I was worried that it was running too hot, but the fan was working properly, so I guess that's just how hot it was supposed to get.
So when people complain nowadays about their new laptops getting too warm or power-hungry, I laugh. Not too long ago a laptop could almost burn a hole in your pants with a battery life of only an hour. And people complain about Athlons needing too much power and producing too much heat for laptop use...
interesting article, frivolous physics (Score:4)
On the other hand it is not clear whether such perceived limits exist in any meaningful sense and are not just reflections of our ignorance.
I recall reading about IBM building a superfast computer to model the process of protein folding (if I remember correctly). Each such computation would take months on that (still nonexistant) enormously fast computer. However thousands of such events occur every second in any living organism...
Re:1 kg != ~0.5 lbs. (Score:1)
Pseudo science at it's finest (Score:1)
First, let's just pretend that humans are going to go for another route than carrying a portable nuke in their laps.
And, the other big issue, you can't predict inventions.
That said, let's throw a few inventions that exist today that offer alternatives that make this technological path highly unlikely.
Reversable switches. They're there, they half the processing speeed, and they have a net heat of zero. Combine that with the work done on 3D crystals, and you could stick the equivalent of all the current chips in the world inside a marble. With no heat issues. might not be the ultimate computer, but a heck of sight better than today's.
Quantum technology is coming along nicely. The limiting factor is the surrounding hardware, not the chip.
Which, of course, brings up the next point - interface design. Xybernaut et al are doing wonderful things in the world of wearable computers. Even skipping the issue of implantables (which are, to a very limited degree, already a reality), things are just going to get smaller. Personal HUDs, total connectivity via some radio band, and probably runs off your body's energy.
I found the article to be grossly irresponsible, the kind of tripe created by a reporter asking clueless questions. The subject deserves better treatement than that.
Some Perspective (Score:2)
Assuming you were running Windows 2200 on the machine, a blue screen of death could be a rather traumatic event. In any case, Gates law tells us that this ultimate machine wouldn't be any faster than our current computers; after all, software slows down by a factor of two every 18 months also - nicely canceling out any increase in speed from the hardware.
Re:Reversible computing (Score:1)
both in classical and quantum physics. You can
measure some quantities without affecting them
(to within current reliability specs, e.g. for
ECC ram). There was an article in Scientific
American not so long ago about some guys measuring
the number of electrons in a cavity without
(to a good approximation) affecting the number of
electrons in it.
So if you don't ask for absolute precision, but
only for good enough precision, then things are
very doable.
Re:interesting article, frivolous physics (Score:2)
Obviously, your mileage may vary, but I've found with my students that comparing things to real-world objects -- even when it simply shifts the exponent by two -- can really help them grasp the immensities.
Re:this answer will self destruct in 10^-51 second (Score:2)
It is true that Asimov was fascinated by the idea of using computers to design their own successors -- something common to Hitchiker's Guide and Hyperion, as well. :)
Re:God's Quake Server (Score:1)
12 dimensional space? (Score:1)
Would this not be a place to 'store' the black hole? eg. dimensions 1-3 are for the physical interface, 4-6 are a safety buffer and 7-9 are processors and memory and 10-12 could be the power supply/heat sink
Just rambling....
Innaccuracies in the article (Score:1)
Re:this answer will self destruct in 10^-51 second (Score:1)
At one time a bored programmer essentially programmed himself, and then when the programmer got interested in a particular female his programmed self got rid of his human competition.
The REALLY cool part about multivac was that it kept making more advanced versions of itsself until around the time of the heat-death of the universe by which time it had evolved into a trans-diminsional thingy which all of humanity took refuge in. Then it had the nerve to say "Let there be light!" :-)
I hope I didn't blow the ending for you.
How about a nuclear powered car? (Score:1)
And I still don't seem to (Score:1)
Hot (Score:2)
From "Black Holes and Baby Universes" by Stephen Hawking (ISBN 0-553-40663-9)
Great (Score:1)
Sure, a computer crashes now and you get pissed, maybe lose some data.
When your computer is a microscopic black hole or a mini-fusion plant, a GPF could mean the end of the Universe.
Black Hole Computers? (Score:1)
Reversible computing (Score:1)
The problem is, after you get your result, how do you maintain reversibility while reading it. But I find that less daunting than the idea of carrying a high temperature black hole around.
Re:lunch box/laptop (Score:3)
Interesting... (Score:1)
Does anyone else think all this knowledge maybe is NOT so good. AC is right, ignorance is bliss. What is so wrong with ignorance anyway? What's the point of knowledge? You learn a bunch of shit and then you die. I used to think I wanted to know things, pursuit of knowledge and all, but the world can a depressing place. Maybe Julius was right and I should just be a bum and wonder the earth (pulp fiction). Well, pulp fiction was really about how no one has it figured out but still, if that's the case, do what makes you happy and fuck everyone and everything else. Hm, I don't know what this post is about but I think my beliefs have changed ONCE again. Have my beliefs ever been right if they are always changing? Is there such a thing as right and wrong? Damn, I keep discovering nihilism and it scares me...
I want one now!!! (Score:1)
Infinite Perspective Computer (Score:2)
Use brownian motion from a hot cup of tea.
Douglas Adams had it all wrong when he was designing the Infinite Perspective Vortex, he was really designing the Infinate Calculation Device. (not to be confused with an improbibility generator)
Oh, never mind.
some help..... (Score:1)
in closing remenber crowley's law:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Love is the law, love under will.
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
Re:Please, people (Score:1)
Yes, but did you read the article? One of the two possible "ultimate" supercomputers was a one-shot sub-microscopic black hole where you write the inputs on the event horizon and get your answer back in the form of Hawking Radiation when the thing self-destructs (operates at 10^-51 operations per second). There's a lot more than classical 3-D Newtonian physics going into that stuff.
I wonder if Apple will patent the idea of selling them in fruity colors...
Do not teach Confucius to write Characters
To what use? (Score:2)
At the time we create such a computer, we would be creating a universe. And our universe would then not matter any more.
Consider that our universe may be a black-hole. Maybe it is one created by someone, or someones.
Creating such a computer would be the goal of our existence, and the end of it (It would not matter anymore). Maybe history is just a long chain of such creations, inside each other?
The above text is definitely religion. But I couldn't stand writing it - the perspectives and thoughts from the article where so huge
Re:What would Dirac say? (Score:1)
As an aside - is this:
(h / 4) * e or h / (4 * e)
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A billion degrees.... (Score:1)
....and I thought my K6 400 mhz was hot.
As is is now, I'm using it as a heater in
my room. It actually puts out more heat then
the two space heaters I have.
Re:What would Dirac say? (Score:1)
So for photons where the mass is zero (m=0) we can solve for the momentum p = E/c.
A solution (Score:1)
God's Quake Server (Score:4)
So the Matrix is just a Quake server? (Score:1)
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
Re:be careful... (Score:1)
Do not teach Confucius to write Characters
Re:be careful... (Score:1)
It's okay, you're totally safe. The thing gives you your output by evaporating, so it's already gone.
>>Are there any predictions for how large the average black hole should be?
The other reason it won't suck you in is it's only like 10^-24 meters or something like that.
Do not teach Confucius to write Characters
Re:What would Dirac say? (Score:2)
This is in fact Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applied to time-energy :
delta(t) * delta(E) >= h/4
I have some doubts about h/4, because it could be hbar/4 (which is equal to h/(16*PI)). But this makes almost no difference. delta(t) can be interpreted as the lifetime of the quantum state and delta(E) would be the uncertainty in the energy, which for ground state is close to the total energy and that is where this approximation comes from.
mass != weight (Score:1)
Nitpicking further: 1kg of material weighs about 2.2 lbs, but only if g = ~9.8 m/s/s. A 1kg laptop weighs less on the Moon, for instance, but it has the same mass.
--Joe--
Re:You San Franciscians... (Score:1)
Correction - It wouldn't be a laptop. (Score:2)
Same thing - laptops may be the gee-whiz gadgets of today, just like room size computers were in the 50s. And they are as likely to be relevant in a future using quantum technology.
I don't see why the article focused on laptops, instead of just general quantum computing. No sense of perspective. Put this in the same category as those futuristic articles some decades ago about disposable paper clothes and waterproof furniture.
w/m
Please, people (Score:2)
We'll need a very large heat sink... (Score:2)
CAN'T resist (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4)
be careful... (Score:2)
Re:God's Quake Server (Score:4)
And then the Devil got greedy and tried to overclock it.
billion degrees? (Score:2)
What would Dirac say? (Score:4)
But according to Einstein's real equation, e^2=m^2c^4 + pc^2, from which we take the square root and arrive at the equation e=mc^2 (p=0). I believe Dirac was the first to toy with the notion of negative energy (or at least question it), since the square root of a number has two answers (positive and negative).
This is good news, since it will enable Microsoft to continue to build operating systems that ccasionally crash. Granted, they will have to reprogram the error routines to include Dark Matter Underflow and Not enough matter to complete operation, but this should be trivial.
In fact, it could be that the reason that earth occasionally swaps poles [msn.com], is that the planets are really bits used in computing some cosmic calculation. Maybe the cosmos is already prototype of one of these devices.
Welcome to the desert of the real.
--
Re:What would Dirac say? (Score:2)
Just for those of use who are not physix geeks, what is the definition of p in the equation?
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
Re:Interesting Article, but is it useful? (Score:2)
Why not?
The author calculated that, assuming Moore's law will continue to hold true, such computers would come into existence in about two hundred years. Now think back two hundred years. What was new technology then, comparable to our supercomputers? Steam engines: some advanced outlets had them, most manufacturers still used manual labor energy, water and animals. Even though the rate of technical progress has been rather slow during the past twohundred years compared to the past fifty years alone, those things have been obsolete for a long time now. You think your great^5 grandfather could imagine using *lightning* (the only form of electricity a peasant - most people were peasants back then - would have been familiar with) to light up his interior, to name but one example?
Your argument transplanted back to 1800 would run as follows:
Well, maybe they could somehow channel lightning to illuminate some big hall, such as a church or a palace, but my *house*? No way. That's just an accident waiting to happen.
We have no way of comprehending what will be possible in twohundred years time. It sucks, but face it, we'll just have to live without ever having known the good stuff.
this answer will self destruct in 10^-51 seconds (Score:2)
Um, okay.. but personally I prefer today's 1kg laptop which doesn't nuke itself and everything in a mind boggling radius to total oblivion as part of the calculation process. It's more effective for getting useful results. :)
That's not quite the point of the article though, because it's really talking about having a 1kg power source and the rest of the article seems to go into more detail.
This thing makes me think of some old Isaac Asimov stories about a supercomputer called multivac. It did heaps of cool Orwellian stuff.. like calculate crimes people would commit each day so they could be arrested before they were committed.
===
What will go wrong (Score:2)
It's a real bitch... (Score:3)
--
Re:this answer will self destruct in 10^-51 second (Score:2)
Thus proving itself wrong.
Ah, makes sense now. (Score:2)