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You Think Your Current Laptop Runs Hot? 134

Posted by Hemos from the and-irradiated-testes dept.
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."
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You Think Your Current Laptop Runs Hot More

You Think Your Current Laptop Runs Hot

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  • Augh! As if my desktops weren't too loud already. Faster processors and cheap inefficient power supplies make it harder to make quiet custom-built PC's with off-the-shelf components. Of course, if I wanted to spend the money, I could buy Dell, Sony or Compaq. But why?
  • with these wireless ability about, we could look at software to get shared processing working with mobile computers. security may be an issue ... but an be worked arround. imagine having a laptop that works at 600MHz when you're in the middle of nowhere with no pc's in the vacinity, whose performance jumps to several GHz when it's near a few pc's/ other laptops/ servers .... you get the picture. a few problems may need to be ironed out .... like what if the laptop moves out of ange just as the solution is found by the supporting processor ... this is a scheme that will work ... now we need software that supports both anking for assistance ... but providing assistange to authorized "borrowers" of processing. who needs faster laptops when we can make more intelligent machines that can request and recieve help in processing. ... the same ideas may be applied to older/ slower machines in a workplace ... instead of upgrading the processor, getn the machine to mutiprocess.
  • One day you'll be sitting in front of a searing-hot nuclear fireball instead of that grey box

    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.
  • Hmm.. I just stuck 'Beowolf cluster [google.com]' into google.. and a Slashdot 'Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these..' comment came up as the fourth hit. There has to be something seriously wrong there.. Onion

  • Simple... just feed the black hole more matter!

  • Yes, it's true folks. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Slashdot is dead, and the corpse is stinking mightily.
  • Uh, the uncertainty principle will
    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).
  • Well, they very well might be just playing, but I'm guessing (and no, I've not done order-of-magnitude calculations for this) that things like long-range weather prediction, and possibly other forms of "predicting the future" might see a benefit from this kind of expansion in computational speed and storage capacity?
  • The problem is, after you get your result, how do you maintain reversibility while reading it.

    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.
    --
  • No such thing as 'degrees kelvin' anymore. It's 'kelvins'.
  • An obvious rebuttal. But it was a valid question.

    ---------///----------
    All generalizations are false.

  • Re:What kind of battery? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You can buy LiIon batteries for any kind of device.. They're hard to find because they don't sell well. The reason they don't sell well is they are *hella* expensive.

    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.

  • And where in the laptop case do you plan to fit the PII heatsink and fan?

  • In fact, it could be that the reason that earth occasionally swaps poles, is that the planets are really bits used in computing some cosmic calculation. Maybe the cosmos is already prototype of one of these devices.

    What would a Beowulf cluster of these look like?

  • well (Score:3)

    by vectus ( 193351 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @06:09PM (#808304)
    i don't really see any relevance to the article, i mean, it isn't feasible to use a laptop that generates that much heat, and on top of that, why would you want to compress its dimensions until it is a black hole?? i doubt we will ever need (and i may be sorry for writing this later on) a laptop with that much power. it seems that the writer had a lot of free time on their hands, and just played around with some numbers.
  • Right, and if I recall, those mini black holes should be exploding right about now (in a cosmic time frame), and that's taken, what, 6 billion years? Of course that is "fast" compared to standard size black holes, which would probably take much longer than the entire life span of the universe to explode. Nonetheless, our radio telescopes should have seen at least a few of these events, and I don't think we have, so it makes you wonder if mini black holes really exist.

    Of course, they've been slowly radiating all the time, but the actual explosion takes a long time in human terms.

  • Ah yes, MULTIVAC. Anybody remember the short story "The Last Question?" I love that one. If we believe Asimov, the ultimate computer is one moved into hyperspace and fused with Man's consciousness.

    "And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
    And there was light-

    Hehe, Asimov rules.

  • Ugh. I know that feeling. My room sounds like a freakin' airport.

    Oh . . . excuse me . . . gotta go . . . I think an UltraSparc just landed . . .
  • Ubernewby,

    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 ;)

  • instead of physicists causing the end of the world (that brookhaven fiasco with people saying, "the reason we've never run into an alien species is because once you become so advanced, you wipe yourselves out") we're going to be obliterated by Intel?! (or transmeta or amd, or your microprocessor company of choice... fuck you and your 'freedom of choice' if the world's gonna end, let it be intel)
    --
    Peace,
    Lord Omlette
    ICQ# 77863057


  • 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)

    by nutty ( 70104 )
    Are you sure those newscientist guys aren't just reminiscing about the powerbook 5300?

    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


  • 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.

  • ....at which point you start running Linux or some other *IX instead, which is actually scalable. I don't remember seeing Pine slowing down by a factor of 100 or so over the past 10 years....

    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. :)
  • Where do you want to plug in the 1" square Mobile P-III in your desktop m/board?
  • When will Alan Cox have Linux ported to it? ;)
  • Clearly reality will prevent us actually building a device like this so it will be a few orders of magnitude less powerful. However the article concluded that such a device could be built within the next 200 years (following Moore's law) That doesn't seem very far away given I can remember computing 40years ago.

  • Back of the envelope nanocomputer numbers. (Score:5)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @07:47PM (#808317)
    While waiting for the article to load, I did back-of-the-envelope calculations for the performance of the best possible 1 kg computer with atom-sized features.

    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:


    • 5e24 computing elements.
    • 3.75e38 FLOPS (single-precision multiplies).
    • 3e17 Hz.
    • 6e23 watts.
    • Surface temperature of 1.15e8 degrees Kelvin.


    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.
  • ...shoving record uptime's in each others face when god comes down and utters:

    Of course then there is this: In the beginning there was the computer. And God said ... [terindell.com]

  • Why would we need a dense black hole computing device from which no coherent information can be extracted? We already have Microsoft Windows...

  • Actually if you follow links from the article about hte Cray for sale... That did some protein folding calculations.

  • Not at all.... mobile pentium 266.

    Forget those fancy PIII's on laptops, marvel at my 8 hour battery life.

  • 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.


    ===
  • Multivac is used in many many many of Asimov's stories the author above was mentioning a different one from The Last Question . If I remember correctly he was quoting All the Troubles of the World Anyway I thought you should know what you said is just one way Asimov explains Multivac. Enjoy
  • Compare this with today's standard laptop, which has a clock speed of about 500 megahertz and carries out up to 1000 parallel operations each cycle
    Where can I get one of these? I thought I was lucky if all three pipelines issued at once in my processor...

    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)

    by miguel_at_menino.com ( 89271 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @05:47PM (#808325)
    Personally, I think apple's new notebook should be a combination lunch box / notebook. Run it really hot, keep you coffee warm.

  • Re:interesting article, frivolous physics (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

    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.

  • Actually I can get pretty close to that with my PIII 600. Then again using a power efficient OS (*cough* linux *cough*) is a big factor. ;-)
  • I know the point of the article wasn't to mention if the computer would be useful, but to see how far we could go, stating that that would be the limit.

    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.'
  • Nitpicking, I know, but if I had a decently performing laptop, with a good keyboard and display, all in 1 kg, I'd be mighty happy!
  • put your faith in human ingenuity. If the rate of progress doesn't slow, we'll reach these ultimate physical limits in just two hundred years' time
    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....

  • The author certainly understands Hawking radiation better than you do. Here's where you go wrong:
    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.

  • The problem is, after you get your result, how do you maintain reversibility while reading it

    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.

  • But really, a black hole ate my homework!!!!

  • Well. 10^51 means it is 10 times faster than 10^50. If you compare e.g. P75 and PIII-750. There is a lot of games that work okay in 750 MHz PII but are unplayable on P75. (Okay,PIII-750 is faster than P75 overclocked to 750 MHz, but this is a example only...)
  • Hm, dont you think this sounds a bit like material for a Jeff Noon (Vurt) short story? I mean, computers using black holes for computing... It almost sound poetic..
  • The assumption "the more volume, the more possible positions of particles in the computer" leading to the eventual conclusion of limits on storage capacity has already been invalidated by modern science.

    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)

    by geoffeg ( 15786 ) <geoffegNO@SPAMsloth.org> on Saturday September 02, 2000 @08:04PM (#808337) Homepage
    In fact, it could be that the reason that earth occasionally swaps poles, is that the planets are really bits used in computing some cosmic calculation. Maybe the cosmos is already prototype of one of these devices.

    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

  • I had a circa 1995 WinBook XP laptop I bought used a few years ago. Running Win95 with its mere 8 megs of RAM was a bit slow, but hey I'd been using old 25MHz MAcs in the computer lab, so it was faster than whet I was used to.

    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)

    by snarkh ( 118018 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @06:26PM (#808339)
    The physical computations in the article seem a little on the soft side. However it does make an interesting observation that we are still very very far from the physical limits of computational power.

    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...

  • Nitpicking, i know but 1 kg = ~2.2 lbs.
  • The article is a fabulous piece of work - mixing solid scientific calculations with just plain idiotic assumptions.

    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.

  • 10E10 Joules is the energy released by 1 Kilo Ton atom bomb. The 10E17 Joules listed in the article for the conversion of one KG of mass to energy would be the equivalent of a 10 Gigaton H bomb. Such a weapon would produce a fire ball about 21 miles in diameter, and the circle of total destruction from its detonation would have a radius of about 210 miles.

    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.

  • Different states can be degenerate in energy
    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.
  • Blockquoth the poster:
    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?
    As a physics teacher I deal with issues of visualization a lot, and I have to disagree. Sure, 4.2e6 ft is the same as 3000 time the height of the Empire State Building. But (I would argue), contextually, they convey different information. People have a notion of the ESB as "big". It's a unit of reference for bigness. So taking their expectation of big -- the ESB -- and then saying it's three thousand times as big, conveys the overwhelming size.

    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.

  • Blockquoth the poster:
    But multivac was the result of a positronic brain designing a better computer, which then designed a better one, and so forth a few times.
    Actually, I believe all that "Multivac" and "positronic" have in common is that Asimov coined them via a simple extension of a then-hip word ("Univac" and "electronic", respectively). I'm pretty sure that the Multivac universe -- to the extent that the various Multivac stories even cohabit the same universe -- is distinct from the positronic robots / _Caves of Steel_ / Foundation universe.

    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. :)

  • Now we take that same amount of space and fill it with interacting interacting particles/waves. How much do we gain from quantum superposition?
  • I remember reading a article on string theory that stated that there are actually 12 dimensions to space and that the we exist in 3 of them. The other dimensions are 'folded back' upon themselvs and are not directly accessable.

    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....
  • I think the writer was misreading some stats. Accoring to the article, the laptop from which I am posting should have an approximate power of about one Teraflops. Don't I wish.
  • But multivac was the result of a positronic brain designing a better computer, which then designed a better one, and so forth a few times.

    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.


  • This is a stupid article, akin to saying that today's cars are so slow because they use chemical energy of burning hydrocarbons, instead of directly converting the chemicals to energy, I'm guessing in some sort of dilithium crystal chamber. That this got published is sad.

  • Hot (Score:2)

    by tooth ( 111958 )
    [Sorry for any typos in this. Personally, I wouldn't want this "laptop" on my lap!]

    ...For a black hole with a mass of the sun, the temperature is only about ten-millionth of a degree above absolute zero ...

    ... a black hole with a mass of only a billion tons ... roughly the size of a proton - would have a temperature of some 120 billion degrees Kelvin ... [This sized] black hole would release energy at the rate of 6,000 megawatts, equivalent to the output of six large nuclear power plants.

    From "Black Holes and Baby Universes" by Stephen Hawking (ISBN 0-553-40663-9)

  • Ok, I'm a sucker for faster computers and all, but think:

    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? This must be old news, they already have them at the White House.
  • Interesting, but I believe that theoretically flipping bits shouldn't require any energy at all if you do it at the quantum level, and take are that your operations are all reversible (and a few other little things).

    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)

    by ptbrown ( 79745 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @07:02PM (#808356)
    For the last time, Apple is *NOT* abandoning the PowerPC for Intel hardware.

  • 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...
  • The bummer is that it only comes with a 56k modem
  • I have to admit, that about 1/3 of the way through the article (about when the author started yammering about the computer not having any mass for non-processing parts, like that's gonna happen) I was wondering about how the computer's power supply starts the process of doing what it does. Then I got to thinking of what kind of power source could be used to provide the vast amount of disparate levels of power needed, And it struck me:

    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.
  • read Robert A. Wilson's illuminatus, should help your develping nihilism. and help you loose those pesky beliefs. agonstism is the way to go.

    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
  • >>The moment we exhaust the physical limitations of these three dimensions, we'll find a way to use some others

    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
  • When I read the article, I came to think: To what use? What would you use such a computer for? And then: To simulate a universe, or merely, to be one. During the time of the existence of the micro-black-hole-computer, nothing is input, nothing is output. Everything is input at its creation, and output at its destruction. This would be a self-contined micro-universe, with one goal: To calculate something.
    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 :)
  • In 1998, Norman Margolus and Lev Levitin of MIT calculated that the minimum time for a bit to flip is Planck's constant divided by four times the energy.

    As an aside - is this:
    (h / 4) * e or h / (4 * e)
    --

  • ....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.

  • The momentum of the matter. Aka velocity times rest mass. The equation is actually E^2 = (m c^2)^2 + (p c)^2.

    So for photons where the mass is zero (m=0) we can solve for the momentum p = E/c.
  • So clear a grilling area on your laptop and cook up some breakfast on your way to work! I heard that iBooks are dishwasher-safe.

  • God's Quake Server (Score:4)

    by r2boston ( 222949 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @08:35PM (#808367) Homepage
    Maybe, just maybe, God was really just trying to create a decent Quake Server and created the universe instead.
  • So the Matrix we all live in is just a game of Quake 3?
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • Sorry, it's already operating at the theoretical maximum speed. You'd have to cluster some toghether and try some distributed operations.

    Do not teach Confucius to write Characters
  • >>Watch out, you might get sucked in when you go to take your data to be processed by the black hole computer.

    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
  • h / (4*E) in order to get units of seconds -- Planck's is in Joule.sec and E is in Joules.
    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.

  • 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
    --
  • No. But does it matter? All shit stinks.
  • There's a good chance we wouldn't be using laptops so far in the future. Just imagine someone in the previous century making predictions - "People will have telegraphy poles in their homes using advanced electrical technologies, and these poles will be so light, that anybody can lift them easiy, for they will be made of miraculous substances like plastics!"

    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
  • The moment we exhaust the physical limitations of these three dimensions, we'll find a way to use some others. People are more resourceful than you give them credit, especially when there's a buck to be made by it.
  • If this thing runs at a billion degrees, we'll need a very large heat sink. And I'll be damned if I'm putting a black hole on my lap. OTOH, there is something to be said about being able to simulate the neural net of a human being by simulating the location of every atom inside someone's head...
  • Imagine a Beowolf cluster of them

  • Comment removed (Score:4)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @08:47PM (#808381)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Watch out, you might get sucked in when you go to take your data to be processed by the black hole computer. That would really stink. I think I'll stick with my PC for now. Are there any predictions for how large the average black hole should be? This might not make a very practical computer...

  • Re:God's Quake Server (Score:4)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @08:48PM (#808384) Journal

    And then the Devil got greedy and tried to overclock it.

  • thats nothing compared to a pentium 4's heat:)

  • What would Dirac say? (Score:4)

    by empesey ( 207806 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @06:49PM (#808396) Homepage
    Because a computer can't contain negative energies, the spread in energy of a bit cannot be greater than its total energy. In 1998, Norman Margolus and Lev Levitin of MIT calculated that the minimum time for a bit to flip is Planck's constant divided by four times the energy.

    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.
    --
  • 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)

    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."

  • 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.

    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.

  • So the ultimate laptop, one that has converted all its mass-energy to radiation, would be able to carry out a mind-boggling 1051 operations per second. Compare this with today's standard laptop, which has a clock speed of about 500 megahertz and carries out up to 1000 parallel operations each cycle--a total of about 1012 operations per second.

    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.


    ===
  • Where I work we had some Hitachi laptops that used to catch on fire because of some design flaw. No big deal really, nobody ever got hurt. So I can only imagine what might happen when something goes wrong inside one of these computers! I'd hate to be in the middle of typing a spreadsheet and suddenly my laptop dissappears out of existence, or worse yet, turns into a star!

  • It's a real bitch... (Score:3)

    by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @07:25PM (#808417) Homepage
    ...typing on a laptop that's become a singularity. The keys are *so* close together!


    --
  • like calculate crimes people would commit each day so they could be arrested before they were committed.

    Thus proving itself wrong.

  • And I thought I was special becuase no one else caught it. I just didn't read it close enough.

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