Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM unveils computer fed by 'electronic blood'

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–37 of 37 posts

Re: IBM unveils computer fed by 'electronic blood'

#31

Post by devx »

While this may be a huge improvement in computer power/space occupied compared to today's classical computers, since nature tends to "compute" stuff so much more efficiently than our PC's, it still feels like a pretty transitional phase to me versus quantum computers.

We need to learn how to compute at the sub-atomic level with mind-blowing efficiency (trillions of trillions more operations for insignificant power consumption). Once we learn how to do that, we'll be the masters of our galaxy, or potentially even the universe.

Re: IBM unveils computer fed by 'electronic blood'

#32

Post by jessaustin »

eksith wrote: post #19

I can't be the only one who thought of Ghost in The Shell while reading this. If anything, this is a way to explain away the presence of white 'blood' in the cyborgs of the series. I can understand the power issue, but I wonder why 3D chips aren't pursued more. It can't be just the cooling since liquid cooling (as mentioned) is in use. Maybe inefficiencies in power distribution and distance to adjacent junctions? If…

I love GitS, but when I see "white blood" I think of Bishop and the other androids from the Alien series.

Re: IBM unveils computer fed by 'electronic blood'

#34

Post by X4 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #7

"Their vision is that by 2060, a one petaflop computer that would fill half a football field today, will fit on your desktop." Will it be able to run Crysis? But seriously, I'd be even more interested in how these computers will be programmed. Any wild speculations?

Simple answer. Star Trek like. NLP + AI + Data-Flow-Based Programming.

☛ "Computer make a sandwich, with extra cheese!"

    • 1:Computer analyses the command, reverse-engineers the receipe on an atomar/molecular level.

    • Femto-lasers a nanostructure to the replicator using computer models

    • 3D Prints synthetic biomimetic chemical protein and nano-textured (for color) carbohydrates

☛ "Computer make a new sandwich, this time more piquant!"

    • Computer this time tries to optimize the taste based on personal data and global taste data

    • GOTO: 1

--

Most of this can be done today already

Re: IBM unveils computer fed by 'electronic blood'

#35

Post by wmf »

webhat wrote: post #25

The art of liquid cooling has been demonstrated by Aquasar and put to work inside the German supercomputer SuperMUC which - *perversely* - harnesses warm water to cool its circuits. How is it perverse to cool hot circuits with warm water?

The efficiency of cooling is proportional to delta t, so it's much better (for the computer) to cool a computer with cold water. But how did you produce that cold water? Probably with some energy-intensive refrigeration process. Thus AFAIK it's more efficient overall to use a higher inlet temperature (presumably with a higher flow rate).

Re: IBM unveils computer fed by 'electronic blood'

#36

Post by cma »

devx wrote: post #30
LAMike wrote: post #3

Could you imagine the graphics that are possible with a one petaflop computer? Simulation status right? I'm praying we (humanity) don't nuke ourselves to death during some stupid WWIII type situation before we get there

Carmack said we need 5 petaflops for truly realistic graphics. But I'm not even sure if he considered 4k+ resolutions, 120+ FPS and 3D when he said that, because all of those may play a role too in the future if we want "Matrix-like" graphics in our virtual reality goggles or holodecks. So we might need orders of magnitude more powerful hardware than that still.

If you can track the eye with low enough latency you only need to render high res in the tiny fovea region, low res everywhere else.

Re: IBM unveils computer fed by 'electronic blood'

#37

Post by scotth »

lmm wrote: post #26
adamnemecek wrote: post #7

"Their vision is that by 2060, a one petaflop computer that would fill half a football field today, will fit on your desktop." Will it be able to run Crysis? But seriously, I'd be even more interested in how these computers will be programmed. Any wild speculations?

Most people will use some hacked-on C extensions. They'll waste most of the performance, but the inner loops will be fast, and this approach will do better on benchmarks (which involve a small amount of heavily-optimized code). A few will use Haskell/Erlang/etc. and make better use of the performance.

I loved this comment.

I'm pretty sure it's a (half) joke...

Post reply on HN