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

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51–60 of 97 posts

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

#51
post #19

Whole brain simulation, AGI.

A truck with 1000000000hp still won't beat a Ferrari on a race track, nothing guarantees faster hardware would solve any of our AI problems

A 1000000000hp equivalent electric truck generating much tork would probably lift off and fly to the Moon, or dig itself so deep it would melt in lava. In the meantime, a cybertruck with 3 motors (or 4) may soon (2023?) challenge Ferrari.

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

#52
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I imagine limitless tailor made entertainment and control on a per-user basis.

"Play me Frank Zappa's new album featuring Kanye West."

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

#53
post #12
post #11

Instead of electron we'd be bundling an entire OS with our chat apps.

Electron basically IS an entire OS. Since Chromium has APIs for doing just about anything, including accessing the filesystem and USB devices and 500 other APIs.

If _accessing_ the filesystem counts toward being an OS, and not _implementing_ the filesystem, then I guess Qt and the stdlib of every lang is also "kind of an OS"

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

#54
post #21

The 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…

However, 1000x is really not very much. With a 1000x uplift, we could certainly get better weather predictions, but not necessarily paradigm-altering improvement. In a real sense, we already have 1000x speedup and its what you get in a contemporary "supercomputer", whatever that is in a given market at a given point in history.

Let's say we had perfect 1000x improvement in compute, storage, and IO such that everything remains balanced. A fluid-dynamics or atmospheric simulation can only increase resolution by about 10x if a 3D volumetric grid is refined uniformly, or only about 5x if we spread it uniformly over 4D to also improve temporal resolution. Or maybe you decide to increase the 2D geographic reach of a model by 30x and leave the height and temporal resolution alone. These growth factors are not life-changing unless you happen to be close to a non-linear boundary where you cross a threshold from impractical to practical.

I'm not sure we can say how much a video game would improve. There are so many "dimensions" that are currently limited and it's hard to say where that extra resource budget should go. Maybe you currently can simulate a dozen interesting NPCs and now you could have a crowd of 10,000 of them. But you still couldn't handle a full stadium full of these interesting behaviors without another 10x of resources...

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

#55
post #32
post #21

The 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, imag…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVxS9RXt2q8

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

#57
post #2

java 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...]

Java runs at 90% the speed of C for most common benchmarks.

It uses 50x the RAM to do so. But you're dead wrong to think java is slow.

The only reason physics game engines are written in C++ is because physics game engines are written in C++.

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

#58
post #25
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A truck with 1000000000hp still won't beat a Ferrari on a race track, nothing guarantees faster hardware would solve any of our AI problems

Training time is a massive constraint on advancement of the science, so at the very least the field would progress much faster and be much more accessible to researchers.

Faster processing alone won't make training 1000x faster, the bottleneck is more on the memory size / bandwidth side
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