Imagine if we had an unlikely scientific breakthrough and many orders of magnitude faster general-purpose CPUs, probably alongside petabyte-scale RAM modules and appropriately fast memory bus, become widely available. Besides making bloatware on a previously unimaginable scale possible, what other interesting, maybe revolutionary, impossible today or at least impractical, applications would crop up then?
Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
1–10 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#2java might run at a decent speed... Might, but probably won't (jk, sorry, I couldn't help myself...) [edit Grammarly decided to remove some text when fixing spelling...]
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#3Whole brain simulation, AGI.
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#41 million Science per Minute Factorio bases.
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#5First thing that comes to mind is using your mobile device as your main workstation would become a lot more realistic.
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#6Windows 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 before you end up stalling waiting for more data
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#7Whole brain simulation, AGI.
Still not even close to a brain though.
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#8Realistically, 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 ram modules also mean exabyte disk drives). So you can be your own Internet Archive, which is great. Alternatively, you can be your own NSA or Google/Facebook in terms of tracking everyone, which is less great.
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#9Much more complicated redstone CPUs in Minecraft.
Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
#10Infinite arbitrary precision real time Mandelbrot zoom generation :-)