Computer IT/hardware, where are the most improvements lately & where are the technical limits.

Alain De Vos

Alain De Vos

Computer IT/hardware, where are the most improvements lately & where are the technical limits ?
[My GSM is more powerfull than the computer to land the first lunar module on the moon]
 
I think that Moore's Law is doing pretty well no matter where you look.

For some time I have been focused on reducing power consumption and noise.

Developments in the mini-PC area have now got to what I think is a pretty good place. You can now get very small footprint custom systems with:
  • passive cooling (fan optional);
  • 10 Watt max TDP CPU;
  • 2 GHz high end 4-thread Pentium CPU;
  • full CPU features for crypto and virtualisation;
  • 2.5 Gbit Intel I225 or I226 NICs;
  • sufficient (up to 64 GiB) memory capacity (2 x SODIMM);
  • 2 x M.2 slots for NVMe SSD mirror; and
  • Intel 4K UHD graphics (no production FreeBSD support yet).
These systems meet most of my needs for hardware, which are mostly media servers, media clients, plus a virtualisation server.

Much of my hardware is more than a decade old (AMD Phemon II vintage), and I'm replacing them slowly (I had another fail this week) with these small systems. I'm also planning to move to switches with 2.5 Gbit ports and 10 Gbit uplinks (but waiting for that market to mature a little bit).

Eventually, the ZFS server will be the only noisy, hot, and heavy piece left in the collection. I don't see it shrinking any time soon, as the time to re-silver stops me moving to very large capacity disks.
 
Quantum computers ftw.


Most powerful quantum computer to date:
spectrum.ieee.org

IBM Goes Big With 433-Qubit Osprey Chip

In 2021, IBM unveiled Eagle, the first quantum processor with more than 100 qubits. Now the company has debuted Osprey, which has more than 3x as many qubits. If Big Blue can keep up the pace, next year it should be on track to deliver Condor, the world's first quantum computer with 1000+ qubits.
spectrum.ieee.org spectrum.ieee.org
 
Process shrinking has reached a point where things like cache memory or io drivers are no longer safe to do. These are more or less analog circuits. We will see multi-die chips more and more. We may see massive multicore chips more often. There will be more chips like the apple silicon where memory is on the same package. Less modularity, more lockdown.
 
Light computers are a better idea than silicon which has almost completely reached its limits and furthermore you can see the reality here:
www.datafantic.com

How much time do we waste waiting for websites to load?

A few weeks ago, I came across a blog post claiming that websites today are no faster than they were more than 10 years ago. My first reaction was disbelief. After all, home and mobile broadband today are significantly faster than 10 years ago. With home broadband reaching 70 Mbps
www.datafantic.com www.datafantic.com
edg.io

Edgio Blog - The Internet Is Faster, but Websites Are Slower

Even with 5g internet speeds, page loads on mobile have increased. Optimizing for milliseconds can make eCommerce sites millions. Here’s how and why.
edg.io edg.io
 
Alain De Vos said:
Computer IT/hardware, where are the most improvements lately & where are the technical limits ?
[My GSM is more powerfull than the computer to land the first lunar module on the moon]
Click to expand...
One hard limit is the minimum size in which transistors can be made. This limit is quite in reach nowadays with the current materials, scientists have already created 1 nm transistors, the size of an atom is now not so far away any longer.
 
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