You are also forgetting the ridiculous amount of software bloat literally introduced at the OS level. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCNmhpcjJCQ Look at how fast windows 7 works compared to windows 11. Think of how much telemetry, bloatware windows 10 and 11 ship with. A new methodology that teases a different direction from silicon chips is definitely a must step but software vendors need to come together as well and highlight the bloat problem. Perhaps for the next windows release, in addition to Home, Professional and Pro, how about Windows Maximal, a highly streamlined version of windows with only the absolute minimal set of things installed to get your system running at 2x speeds compared to Windows Home. Charge it double maybe?
A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
21–27 of 27 posts
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#22You are also forgetting the ridiculous amount of software bloat literally introduced at the OS level. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCNmhpcjJCQ Look at how fast windows 7 works compared to windows 11. Think of how much telemetry, bloatware windows 10 and 11 ship with. A new methodology that teases a different direction from silicon chips is definitely a must step but software vendors need to come together as well a…
Just look at the demoscene for some great example of what it means to fully exploit what the hardware is actually capable of.
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#23You are also forgetting the ridiculous amount of software bloat literally introduced at the OS level. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCNmhpcjJCQ Look at how fast windows 7 works compared to windows 11. Think of how much telemetry, bloatware windows 10 and 11 ship with. A new methodology that teases a different direction from silicon chips is definitely a must step but software vendors need to come together as well a…
A few years ago I ran Windows XP in a VM inside Windows 10.
When you pressed Win+E, Windows opens an explorer window (in both versions).
In XP this happens in the span of a single video frame.
In Windows 10, first nothing happens, then a big white rectangle, then you get to watch all the UI elements get painted in one by one.
The really impressive part is that this was before they rewrote explorer as an electron app! I think it might actually be faster now that it's an electron app.
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is crazy you can buy a used laptop for $15 and do something meaningful with like writing code (meaningful as in make money) I used to have this weird obsession of doing this, buying old chromebooks putting linux on them, with 4GB of RAM it was still useful but I realize nowadays for "ideal" computing it seems 16GB is a min for RAM
It's like the black Mac from 2007, I know its tech is outdated but I want it
Definitely one of my favourite machines of all time (until the plastic started falling off).
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#25I stopped reading after "Soon, you will not be able to afford your computer. Consumer GPUs are already prohibitively expensive."
That irked me too. "_Bleeding edge" consumer GPUs are ...", sure, but you wait 6 months and you have it at a fraction of the cost. It's like saying "cars are already prohibitively expensive" whilst looking a Ferraris.
> That irked me too. "_Bleeding edge" consumer GPUs are ...", sure, but you wait 6 months and you have it at a fraction of the cost.
That's demonstrably false. The RTX 4090 released in 2022 with an MSRP of $1,600. Today you'd be hard pressed to find one below $3K that isn't a scam.
The reality is that NVIDIA is taking advantage of their market dominance to increase their markup with every generation of products[1], even when accounting for inflation and price-to-performance. The 50 series is even more egregious, since it delivers a marginal performance increase, yet the marketing relies heavily on frame generation. The trickling supply and scalpers are doing the rest.
AMD and Intel have a more reasonable pricing strategy, but they don't compete at the higher end.
[1]: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidias-pricing-stra...
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#26You are also forgetting the ridiculous amount of software bloat literally introduced at the OS level. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCNmhpcjJCQ Look at how fast windows 7 works compared to windows 11. Think of how much telemetry, bloatware windows 10 and 11 ship with. A new methodology that teases a different direction from silicon chips is definitely a must step but software vendors need to come together as well a…
Just look at the demoscene for some great example of what it means to fully exploit what the hardware is actually capable of.
It's always cited as an example, and it's highly impressive yes, but it's also highly focused, with a very partial feature set, I'm not sure that type of coding is applicable to mass scale software.
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#27In 25 years we'll have #GlassModels. A "chip", which is a passive device (just a complex lens) made only of glass or graphene, which can do an "AI Inference" simply by shining the "input tokens" thru it. (i.e. arrays of photons). In other words, the "numeric value" at one MLP "neuron input" will be the amplitude of the light (number of simultaneous photons). All addition, multiplication, and tanh functions will be do…
If you contextualize Star Trek's "isolinear chips" to be something like this, they start to seem considerably more sensible.
Has anyone built a physical ASIC that embeds a full model yet?