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Anonymous
Computers and the space they occupy 2017-08-24 02:01:27 Post No. 62057856
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Computers and the space they occupy 2017-08-24 02:01:27 Post No. 62057856
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I don't know jack about computer science, so I apologize if this is a stupid thread.
I'm kind of fascinated by comparisons between the first computers and modern computers. For example, I found an article comparing the ENIAC to old turn-of-the-century cell phone.
It claims the ENIAC took up 40,000,000 times more space, and the cellphone was 1,300 times more powerful. Let's not get hung up on the accuracy of the numbers.
But this has me wondering. With unlimited space and resources, could they have made a computer of the same type as the ENIAC 1,300x larger that could rival the cellphone in power? Could you make one many thousands times larger that could render modern video games?
Maybe that's a stretch with that kind of computer, but if we weren't concerned about cost or physical space or even practicality, can we pack more and more power in a computer?
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>>62057856
the latency would be extremely massive, so it would still take a lot more time to do the calculations than a smartphone, that's why people are trying to shrink processor more and more
but yes, you could simulate transistor logic on a macroscopic scale if you wanted
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>>62057856
Something tells me you would be running into physical limits of how fast electricity travels.
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>>62057971
If you were building this hypothetically, youd probably use fibre cables
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>>62057856
It's okay you don't need to apologize. This isn't reddit.
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>>62058051
i think he is saying during the time the eniac was built. There was no fiber back then.
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>>62058085
the nazis build a computer to host a guy's consciousness, i saw it in the documentary captain america the winter soldier
if they could simulate a human brain then our wonderful and diverse engineers could certainly do a video game
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>>62058051
You would run into issues even with light. From my super google skills: Light travels 100x faster than electricity. ENIAC takes up 40,000,000x the space of a cellphone.
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I've had a similar question for a while.
We have supercomputers and database rooms and etc, I don't feel like those really equate to the old room sized computers like ENIAC. I what oculd be accomplished with a modern non-quantum ENIAC.
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>>62058364
The only real way to do something like that these days is to keep adding nodes to a cluster until it fills the room, but that doesn't really help with tasks that can't be split into threads effectively, and even ones that can run into practical limits of how many threads you can split them into. At best you'd have a cluster that can run multiple complex things at once, and you might as well just have different clusters for the different tasks.
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>>62058118
Is this a cleverly disguised troll? I'm too tired to be sure
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No, because thermionic valves are a massive pain for computers.
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>>62057923
>that's why people are trying to shrink processor more and more
cough skylake-x threadripper cough
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>>62057856
If a modern size CPU die (like 1 square cm) was clocked to 12GHz, the processing would break the speed of light
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>>62060129
Be clever about shit posting at least.
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>>62060177
They're a massive pain for anything except making really cool sounds.
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>>62057856
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