Atlassian products would be twice as fast.
Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
31–40 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#32The thing is, computing has been getting steadily faster, just not at quite the pace it was before and in a different way. With GPUs we have proven that parallelism can be just as good or even better than speed increases in enhancing computation. And there again have been speed increases trickling in. I don't think it's realistic to say that more speed advances are unlikely. We have already been through many differen…
>With GPUs we have proven that parallelism can be just as good or even better than speed increases in enhancing computation.
Not really, no. It's just that certain classes of problems can be very readily parallelized and it's relatively easy to figure out how to do something 1000x in parallel compared to figuring out how to achieve a 1000x single thread speedup.
>Much more realistic virtual reality. For example, imagine a realistic forest stream that your avatar is wading through, with realtime accurate simulation of the water, and complex models for animal cognition of the birds and squirrels around you.
I'm not sure 1000x would do much more than scratch the surface of that, especially if you're already tying a lot of it up with higher fidelity rendering.
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#33Single-shard MMO with no instancing requirements.
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#34Weather forecasts would be as good as they are now, perhaps 1-2 days further ahead.
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#35Your question is missing the factor of power - If we have 1000x at current power usage or 1000x at 1000x power?
Also, 1000x parallelism or 1000x single core?
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#36React Native could now handle 500,000,000 3rd party jankfest line rather than just 100,000,000
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#37Some applications depend on approximately solving optimization problems that are hard even for small problems.
The poster child here is combinatorial optimization (more or less equivalently, np-complete problems), concrete examples are SMT solvers and their applications to software verification [1]. Non convex problems are sometimes similarly bad.
Non smooth and badly conditioned optimization problems scale much better with size, but getting high precision solutions is hard. These are important for simulations mentioned elsewhere, but not just for architecture and games, also for automating design, inspections etc [2].
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#38Windows update in the background would take 3 hours invested of 4. Average nodejs manifest file would contain x12000 more dependencies. Also, we would see a ton more AI being done on the local CPU. Anything from genuine OS improvements to super realistic cat filters on teams/zoom. And finally, I think people would need to figure out storage and network bottlenecks because there is only so much you can do with compute…
> Average nodejs manifest file would contain x12000 more dependencies.
This is absolutely true
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#39More bloat
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#40Realistically, AI network training at the level being done by corporations with big server farms, becomes accessible to solo devs and hobbyists (let's count GPU's as general purpose). So if you want your own network for Stable Diffusion or Leela Chess, you can do on your own PC. I think that is the most interesting obvious consequence. Also, large scale data hoarding becomes far more affordable (I assume the petabyte…
I think when that hardware is attainable and the tech democratized things are going to get very bizarre very quickly. I'm hitting a wall in my imagination of what a society where this is common even looks like and it scares me.