So in 50 years the equivalent of a gpt4 training cluster from today's datacenters will fit in a cheap cable, and it will run over 100 times faster than a full cluster today.
Computronium
Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
81–90 of 209 posts
Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
#82I'm curious - are there any ways of finding out the precise hardware that's used in these small-scale devices that are generally not considered to be computers (like smartphone chargers) without actually having to take them apart? Are there special datasheets, or perhaps some documents for government certification, or anything like it? I've always been fascinated with the barebones, low-spec hardware that runs mundane electronic things, so I want to know where the author got all that information from.
Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
#83Weird question maybe, but does anyone keep track of quantitative or qualitative data that measures the discrepancy between consumer (commercial) and government computer technology? TBH, it's kind of amazing that a custom computer from 50 years ago has the specs of a common IC/SoC today, but those specs scale with time.
Why would you expect there to be one? It’s all the same stuff and has been for decades.
I expect nation state actors to have immensely more access to computing power than the commercial sector, is that controversial?
Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
#84Weird question maybe, but does anyone keep track of quantitative or qualitative data that measures the discrepancy between consumer (commercial) and government computer technology? TBH, it's kind of amazing that a custom computer from 50 years ago has the specs of a common IC/SoC today, but those specs scale with time.
There is no difference anymore, the only difference is the scale. Back then, consumers got nothing, governments got largge computers (room sized+), then consumers got microcomputers (desktop sized), governments got larger mainframes, consumers got PCs, government got big-box supercomputers,... And now? Consumers get x86_64 servers , governments get x86_64 servers, and the only difference is how much money you have, h…
I was asking about anyone tracking the disparity between nation-state computing power and commercially available computing power. This seems like something that's uncontroversial.
Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably they meant a program being discovered to be wrong before the computer was actually launched. And meant literally building a whole new computer, not just recompiling a program.
For the Apollo Guidance Computer, changing the program meant manually re-weaving wires through or around tiny magnet rings. A good part of the cost of the computer was the time spent painstakingly weaving the wires to store the program.
There's a very nice video about the assembly lines MIT made just for building the Apollo computer [0].
Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever tried to google that?
Yes - up until a few years ago it was easy to find by googling, but now google has degraded to the point where I can't manage it.
Do you mean this? https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1
Searched "run linux on hard drive without cpu or ram" on Google - third result.
Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
#87Weird question maybe, but does anyone keep track of quantitative or qualitative data that measures the discrepancy between consumer (commercial) and government computer technology? TBH, it's kind of amazing that a custom computer from 50 years ago has the specs of a common IC/SoC today, but those specs scale with time.
There is no difference anymore, the only difference is the scale. Back then, consumers got nothing, governments got largge computers (room sized+), then consumers got microcomputers (desktop sized), governments got larger mainframes, consumers got PCs, government got big-box supercomputers,... And now? Consumers get x86_64 servers , governments get x86_64 servers, and the only difference is how much money you have, h…
I'd argue that the difference is the price. There is still quite a bit of a difference between average consumer and business hardware, but compute power is cheap enough that the average person can afford what was previously only reserved for large companies. The average "consumer computer" nowadays is an ARM smartphone, and while server equipment is purchasable, you can't exactly hit up your local electronics store to buy a server rack or a server CPU. You can still get those things quite easily, but I wouldn't say their main goal is being sold to individuals.
Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
#88> Apollo 11 spacecraft contains 4 computers Analog computers don't get the respect they deserve. There's one more computer, the FCC. The Flight Control Computer is an analog computer in the Saturn V that controlled the rocket gimbals. It's a two-foot cylinder weighing almost 100 pounds.
You forgot the most important one, the human computers at ground control. Who said women can't do math? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...
> Who said women can't do math?
Nobody
Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
#89Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the reference! Kermit could be used locally on ISS or in a lunar mission now that I think about it, but so is/could SSH, web browsers or any modern technology. But most space exploration is robotic and depends on communication to ground stations on Earth, and that is fairly standardized. Perhaps kermit will be used on the lunar surface, and that will be a simplification compared to a web browser interface.…
oh who knows ... I stopped working on that stuff in I think 2006. The big push then was over to CAN and something called AFDX which worked over ethernet. I was dealing with octal and bcd daily, mid 2000s. I have no idea if people still use ARINC-429 or IRIG-B. Embedded RTOS was all proprietary back then for instance, like with VXWORKS. I'm sure it's not any more. I hated vxworks.
Yeah, I'm working on a fly by wire eVTOL project, we are using the CAN bus as our primary bus, but there are a number of off the shelf components like ADAHRS that we use that talk ARINC-429 so our FCCs will have a number of ARINC-429 interfaces.
But at least for the components we're developing, we have basically standardized on ARM, the TMS570 specifically since it offers a number of features for safety critical systems, and simplifies our tooling and safety analysis to use the same processor everywhere.
Z80 is pretty retro, and while I'm sure there may be some vendors who still use it, it's got to be getting pretty rare for new designs, between all the PowerPC, Arm, and now RISC-V processors available that allow you to use modern toolchains and so on, I'd be surprised if many people were doing new designs with the Z80