I was hoping to find an updated version of this, but I guess computers haven’t gotten any Moore compact since
3 months ago by cannedtuna to c/programmer_humor
A picture similar to this one was on one of my high school text books. Inside the cover was a description of it as magnetic core computer memory. For quite a long time I thought this is what computer chips looked like. The only issue was I was in high school in the 80s, long after such memory was used. Maybe the text book was 15 years old, I don't know.
First computer company I worked for was still using it in the early 80s. Slow, but it retained state after a power failure.
Check this out. Very cool.
I knew this was gonna be polymatt! What a great vid.
TL;DW: He makes a memory core from "scratch"
Though not a fan of his reasoning to have it in silicone oil. The computers back then also didn't do that, and they had rougher measuring tooling.
He just wanted a oil-submerged thingy anyway.
AI was 59 in 2015
Now you can wear a full desktop PC on your wrist with 0.7nm chip
Well, it'll be a pretty small chip if the entire thing has to fit on your wrist, so still not equivalent to a 0.7nm desktop chip. They don't generally make the chips smaller, the feature size gets smaller so they can fit more transistors in the same die area
if that's truly from 1957, the whole setup would have several pieces that size. the 803 a few years later was three (one about this size, two a little smaller), plus user console, printer, tape reader. nearly 2000 lbs worth of equipment.
It certainly is.
From the wiki:
"It uses ferrite magnetic-core memory in 4096 or 8192 words of 40 bits, comprising 39 bits of data with parity."
So a whooping 39kB of memory on the largest option!
"Tape is read at 500 characters per second and punched at 100 cps."
Compare that with a micro-SD...
"The bit time is 6 microseconds, jumps execute in 288 microseconds and simple arithmetic instructions in 576 microseconds."
And it run and an incredible speed of 1 to 3kHz!
(And this is overselling the computer, it was slower than what the numbers appear.)
probably loud af too
Actually insane that it is so powerful at that time, without transistors.
That's the same size box my new video card just came in.
Yeah. It's because of improvements in agriculture. It made food cheaper, and people got taller.
Also don't forget the effects of thermal expansion brought on by global warming.
I like the idea we'd all be modern day nephlim giants if it weren't for global warming
You can’t hump a PCB after everyone else has gone home though.
I absolutely can and did. It vibrated and I had a really nice time.
Not an electrical or computer engineer so I can't really speak on the limits of miniaturizing hardware in terms of physics or technological ability. But even if you can fit a full computer on a fingernail, it's gonna be hard to have a even just a USB-C connector on a finger nail. At a certain point, there's little reason to miniaturize computers further when they still have to interface with human usable devices. Instead of miniaturizing the board further, continuing to increase transistor density on the cpu and chips to get more compute power in the same area seems like the obvious focus for future miniaturization efforts.
We're at the point where you can fit an entire computer inside a USB cable end without it looking any different (beware of keyloggers if you're not using your own cables, they can even fit a wifi antenna in there)
Yeah, not even close.
That's an Elliott 405 computer. It could perform up to 500,000 instructions per second, aka FLoating-point Operations Per Second (FLOPS).
The other is a Raspberry Pi Zero which can perform 250,000,000 FLOPS, 500 times the Elliott 405.
And, the Elliott 405 cost between 140k-350k in 1957, depending on the features and configuration chosen. With inflation to 2015 dollars, that's $1.2-2.9 million ($2.40 per 1 FLOPS)
The Raspberry Pi Zero was their new low-power, low-cost board in 2015. It only cost $5 in 2015 (50 million FLOPS per $1)
And for an extra 30 bucks ($35 total) in 2015, you could have picked up a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, which is capable of 24,000,000,000 FLOPS. That is 96 times faster than the Pi Zero, and 48,000 times faster than the Elliott 405. (~686 million FLOPS per $1)
The modern version of this is AI datacenters.
In an amount of years all the crap they are taking up tons of racks for will fit in a cell phone and cost next to nothing.
We might need some new tech instead of shrinking existing tech.
Me: I need some new hardware to run my transformers on
Mom: We have transformers at home
The transformers at home:
Joking aside, I think you're right, using discrete floating point math to simulate a transformer architecture will never be able to approach the efficiency of a "native" analog system like actual brains. I think eventually we'll see someone come up with a hardware transformer that doesn't require full synchronized clock signals.
Jokes aside, I think a brain and a computer solve two different problem sets. A computer needs to be exact, deterministic. A brain needs to be practical, very much at the expense of precision.
I wouldn’t want a brain to do my math calculations for me… brains suck at those, that’s why I use a computer.
If it didnt introduce a spectrum of new issues, I’d wager we could start encoding data into more complex structures than binary. Like using continuous values instead of just on/off. But, from what I understand, that makes the problem of computing damn near impossible and unaffordable.
Maybe we can find ways to encode more data into the same volume of transistors. Like, if current state could imply additional information. But that would probably impede on performance, as I’m sure the data structures used in a CPU prioritize performance not “adding more implied data.”
Hmm… tough one.
Using trinary wouldn't really be a problem, they also already did it over 50 years ago, we just never used it because their tech wasn't precise enough
But i am just a junior in the sector so i know little, if someone can explaim to me why it wouldn't work well, i'd appreciate
There is no way any breakthrough will be made with new technologies whilst the current AI speculation continues over RAM and GPUs, there seems to be still way to much money to be made in this bubble so most of capital resources in this area are being directed tô those "AI" initiatives.
I dunno, necessity breeds innovation. Once current hardware can no longer scale with the hardware requirements, or we completely exhaust the supply of raw materials, something will come along. Crypto mining shifted to ASICs when the GPUs became no longer profitable. I saw not long ago that some crypto mining “businesses” switched to AI so it’s not entirely outside the realm of realiry.
Whether that “something” is a breakthrough in compute, (re)manufacturing, or renewable energy is anybody’s guess. At least IMO as someone who’s been watching on the sidelines for a long time.
Yes, that's neuromorphic computing. Once we properly figure our how to make semiconductor neurons and how to connect them to each other in a big scale, AI will hopefully be less of an energy waste. The current approach with mapping these problems into GPUs is highly inefficient.
You could replace that SBC with microcontroller.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_803
Huh. Clever.
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