Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a link? As far as I can tell you're referring to a BYTE magazine article, but I can only find vague references to it, not anything specific enough that would allow me to locate it.
It was in Byte circa 1989-1991 & I've been trying to search for it with no luck so far. FOUND IT! https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-...
Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
31–40 of 71 posts
Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming you're not in an endless vacuum, the light will also become heat.
I think it's fair to separate it from the direct heat generation because if you look at second order effects like that, pretty much all of the energy ends up being radiated away as infrared in space.
It's hardly a second order effect if you're talking about heating a space and the light is absorbed by the walls of that space.
Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern yes. But olden times atmospheric diesels without turbo were really efficient space heaters.
Good ol' days.
The Volkswagen 1.6D is probably the most reliable engine ever made. Only two failure modes - overheat or shitty fuel for the span of decades to break the fuel pump.
Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's fair to separate it from the direct heat generation because if you look at second order effects like that, pretty much all of the energy ends up being radiated away as infrared in space.
It's hardly a second order effect if you're talking about heating a space and the light is absorbed by the walls of that space.
It's quite literally a second order effect. The first order effect is light generation, and a consequence of that effect is heat generation via light absorption.
Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
#35@3:10 “you need to consider 99.9% of the power is converted to heat” uhm that would be quite an efficient heater you designed there!
One could argue that it is 100% as every Watt that enters through the socket (not counting reactive energy) is going to become heat at some point in the very near future, including the air moved by fans, the photons emitted by the screen, etc etc.
So what happens to the 0.01%? Ah thats.. the light? The sound? Not sure.
Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was in Byte circa 1989-1991 & I've been trying to search for it with no luck so far. FOUND IT! https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-...
https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1988-11_OCR/page/n6/mode... Page 399 This one as well. :)
Just cleaning up the links for future searchers and adding the first part:
Steve Ciarcia, CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR
BYTE Octover 1988, A Supercomputer Part 1. Steve begins a supercomputer project by looking at multiprocessing basics.
https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-... (page 283 in the magazine, page 315 in the PDF)
BYTE November 1988, A Supercomputer Part 2. Steve continues the supercomputer project with a look at the Mandelbrot set.
https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1988-11_OCR/page/n465/mo... (page 399 in the magazine, page 466 in the PDF)
BYTE December 1988, A Supercomputer Part 3. This final part looks at hardware nuts and bolts and also at the driver program.
https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-... (page 327 in the magazine and PDF)
Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
#37@3:10 “you need to consider 99.9% of the power is converted to heat” uhm that would be quite an efficient heater you designed there!
Not really? The best heaters are heat pumps which can under typical operation reach 300-500% efficiency (COP). Technically they aren't converting the electricity into heat, but for arguments sake here about heaters we only care about electricity consumed to heat generated.
TIL, thanks, we mostly burn gas and coal
Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
#38@3:10 “you need to consider 99.9% of the power is converted to heat” uhm that would be quite an efficient heater you designed there!
Every computer is just space heater with side effect of computations. The same way every diesel engine is just oil stove with side effect of rotary motion. If the engine was in the back of the car you could totally put a pot on it and braise something.
My gaming laptop is surely 90% noise and heat (so heat?), but my m1 macbook… is less heat.. but still heat? From reading this thread everything will become heat, which sorta confuses me, but yeh i guess bitluni was nit talking about efficiency but more thermodynamically?!
Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
#39I don't even know how you learn to do something like this. I was curious about the CPU. I found the specs for the WCH570 [1]. Intel released the 486dx4/100 in1994 (for $650). It's not really the same thing but a 100MHz (kind of) 32 bit CPU (that does have an FPU) is about as close as you can find to this (which has no FPU but it does have USB2.0 and 2.4GHz wireless, which is well beyond what Intel CPUs could do at the time).
And this thing is 10-13 cents ~30 years later.
A better comparison would be the ARM CPUs you can get fairly cheaply today (eg the Broadcom BCM2712 in the RPi5) but they're way more capable than the CPUs of 30 years ago. The BCM2712 for example is a 64 bit quad core 2.4GHz CPU.
I guess I'm just amazed at how far hardware has come because I'm old enough to remember just how amazing the 486 was at the time.
[1]: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/04/02/10-cents-wch-ch570-c...
Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
#40@3:10 “you need to consider 99.9% of the power is converted to heat” uhm that would be quite an efficient heater you designed there!
I’m curious about what you’re thinking of, but for both electric heaters and computers, essentially 100% of the input energy is converted to heat one way or another. What you may be thinking of is efficiency when the output is intended to be something other than heat. In those cases, efficiency is lost because a significant proportion of the input energy is converted to heat. But if heat output is what you’re interes…
Yeah, i was totally confused with efficiency, still curious about that 0.01% now tho