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Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?

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Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?

#41
post #15
post #10

Infinite arbitrary precision real time Mandelbrot zoom generation :-)

Can't you already do this with a good shader program? Well, Google search finds one that claims 'almost infinite'.

the best thing I know of is you could emulate 256 bits with 4x64 bits float (double) and then use the derivative of mandelbrot to approximate the fractals around interesting points

Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?

#42

Real-time ray tracing was the goal in the old days. Are we there yet at adequate quality?

I feel like we are - I can run Minecraft RTX at 4k with acceptable framerate using DLSS 2.0 on a 3090. Minecraft is using pure raytracing (no rasterization). It also isn't using A-SVGF or ReSTIR, so there are 2 pretty big improvements that could be made.

Minecraft RTX does suffer really badly with ghosting when you destroy a light source, but my intuition says that A-SVGF would fix that entirely.

That being said, some of the newest techniques, like ReSTIR PT (a generalized form) have only been published for a couple of months, so current games don't have that yet. But in 3-6 months I would start to expect some games go with a 100% RT approach.

Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?

#43

Realistically, 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…

Imagine just saving every web page your computer ever browsers, forever.

Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?

#45

Realistically, 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.

Like any of your great grand parents would be absolutely scared of actual you and stuff you do on a daily basis, at first.

Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?

#48
Video engineer here. Many seemingly network restricted tasks could be unlocked with faster CPUS doing advanced compression and decompression.

1. Video Calls

In video calls, encoding and decoding is actually a significant cost of video calls, not just networking. Right now the peak is Zoom's 30 video streams onscreen, but with 1000x CPUS you can have 100s of high quality streams with advanced face detection and superscaling[1]. Advanced computer vision models could analyze each face creating a face mesh of vectors, then send those vector changes across the wire instead of a video frame. The receiving computers could then reconstruct the face for each frame. This could completely turn video calling into a CPU restricted task.

2. Incredible Realistic and Vast Virtual Worlds

Imagine the most advanced movie realistic CGI being generated for each frame. Something like the new Lion King or Avatar like worlds being created before you through your VR headset. With extremely advanced eye tracking and graphics, VR would hit that next level of realism. AR and VR use cases could explode with incredibly light headsets.

To be imaginative, you could have everything from huge concerts to regular meetings take play in the real world, but be scanned and sent to VR participants in real time. The entire space including the room and whiteboard or live audience could be rendered in realtime for all VR participants.

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/maxine-getting-started

Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?

#49

Windows 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…

> Windows update in the background would take 3 hours invested of 4.

And MacOS updates will still find a way to take your machine offline for an hour

Re: Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?

#50

Real-time ray tracing was the goal in the old days. Are we there yet at adequate quality?

Still orders of magnitude away from full tracing, only as a part of traditional rendering, with a ton of hacks on top.

Actually, there always was a lingering suspicion that brute force simulation might get sidestepped by some another clever technique long before it's achieved, to get both photorealism and ease of creation. ML style transfer could potentially become such a technique (or not).

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