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I consider myself very lucky to be born in this age of civilization where technology increases at such incredible pace. Playing games on an atari in my childhood, then sega master system, nintendo, snes, pc games, the first 3d acceleration consumer cards, all the way to having a supercomputer in my pocket. What a time to be alive.
I consider myself very lucky to be born in this age of civilization where technology increases at such incredible pace. Playing games on an atari in my childhood, then sega master system, nintendo, snes, pc games, the first 3d acceleration consumer cards, all the way to having a supercomputer in my pocket. What a time to be alive.
I think it is more amazing that we went from the Wright brothers in 1903 to landing on the moon in 1969.
Single lifetime from flying a powered wooden glider to flying a rocket to the moon and back
In terms of usefulness and end user experience, I find no difference between the iPhone X (A11, 4 billion transistors) and my current 14. Seems to me that all that extra processing power is still looking for a use case.
Even if you didn't change anything about the software, the newer CPUs would still give you better energy efficiency and thereby longer battery life.
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I think “For All Mankind” is a great “What If” show about what things would be like if we had kept pushing forward. The thing about the series though was that NASA was self funded and didn’t have to justify spending billions in taxpayer money. Also, do we really have better propulsion technology to make space travel more efficient?
Imagine if all of the worlds armament budgets were instead rerouted to science and space travel...
Look after the people on Earth first. Once we show we can accomplish that, then and only then do we begin to earn the stars.
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Even if you didn't change anything about the software, the newer CPUs would still give you better energy efficiency and thereby longer battery life.
But the software devs will always more-than use up any extra efficiency, so it'll still barely last a day, and will die early when it gets heavy use...
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But the software devs will always more-than use up any extra efficiency, so it'll still barely last a day, and will die early when it gets heavy use...
The CPUs (and the software) are so efficient now that only the screen and the radios really consume energy. If you find yourself blaming high CPU usage for low battery life, it's likely you are either incorrect, or the problem is just some bug in the application, nothing intended.
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Imagine if all of the worlds armament budgets were instead rerouted to science and space travel...
And still mostly wasted. Look after the people on Earth first. Once we show we can accomplish that, then and only then do we begin to earn the stars.
I've been reading datasheets a lot at work. The datasheet for an STM32F4 is 149 pages long. The technical manual is over 800 pages long. That puts it into perspective a little bit better for me. I might spend days or weeks writing a driver for some little few pages of that datasheet. It's a dense 800 pages. Those manuals indicate just a fraction of the complexity that lies inside of the device -- they describe features that I can use, not even how those features are implemented or made. And that's for a tiny chip that costs a couple dollars.
A billion is a tough number to understand, but I recommend reading a datasheet of a chip sometime. It will put into perspective how much complexity there is in just a few millions of transistors.
I sometimes have to take a moment, because I remember descriptions of alien technology from sci-fi books. Complexity, opaqueness, power. Chips.
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And still mostly wasted. Look after the people on Earth first. Once we show we can accomplish that, then and only then do we begin to earn the stars.
Sorry, but no. There's billions of people on earth; we can tackle many problems at once in parallel.
In terms of usefulness and end user experience, I find no difference between the iPhone X (A11, 4 billion transistors) and my current 14. Seems to me that all that extra processing power is still looking for a use case.
For me there’s some benefit in little things like on-device OCR and image classification, which has been helpful for quickly surfacing particular photos in my library but yes the broad strokes have not changed much.
It is a useful feature. In particular in Google translate (lens function) which I am pretty was also there on the X (perhaps requiring a trip to Google’s server).