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Handheld Supercomputers in 10-15 Years?
An anonymous reader writes "Supercomputers small enough to fit into the palm of your hand are only 10 or 15 years away, according to Professor Michael Zaiser, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Engineering and Electronics.
Zaiser has been researching how tiny nanowires — 1000 times thinner than a human hair — behave when manipulated. Apparently such minuscule wires behave differently under pressure, so it has up until now been impossible to arrange them in tiny microprocessors in a production environment. Zaiser says he's figured out how to make them behave uniformly.
These "tamed" nanowires could go inside microprocessors that could, in turn, go inside PCs, laptops, mobile phones or even supercomputers. And the smaller the wires, the smaller the chip can be.
"If things continue to go the way they have been in the past few decades, then it's 10 years... The human brain is very good at working on microprocessor problems, so I think we are close — 10 years, maybe 15," Zaiser said."
Before anyone asks. Also you can imagine a beowulf cluster of these, as well as welcome the overlords.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Isn't a super-computer a relative term? I mean, I don't know the exact figure but I would that my Dual Core Intel box at home is probably a good deal faster than a super-computer from the 80s. It is probably hundreds of thousands or perhpas millions of times more powerful than the computers used in the Apollo programme. Surely the measure of what is a super-computer and what isn't must be based upon what the fastest machines are in the world at that time.
Perhaps what he means is that what we currently do with supercomputers today will be able to be done with low cost computing. I can certainly see that being true. In fifteen years, it may be possible to adequately simulate nuclear weapons tests, climate models, or protein folding from a run-of-the-mill desktop.
However, the improvements in computing speed will also apply to super-computers. With that extra power you can run more refined models so I can't see how this could obsolete the traditional bulky super-computer.
In short, I can't really understand the super-computer slant of the article. Why not just talk about general-purpose computing instead?
Simon
Today's handheld devices ARE the supercomputers of decades past. Things are always getting faster and smaller. If you took a WinCE device or iPhone back 15 years, you'd blow peoples' socks off.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
10-15 years from always, I'll wake up to my alarm clock, powered by cold fusion. I'll stumble down stairs and get the keys to the hover car from the kitchen and grab my hand held supercomputer. On the way to work, I'll play Duke Nukem Forever as my car flies me along the correct path.
My work here is dung.
Most of todays cellphones are the super computers of yesteryear. What's really interesting though is what tomorrows super computers will be.
We've already had a joke here saying Vista won't run at full speed, but I think there's a kernel of truth, there.
If you can put a supercomputer in your hand, it's not a supercomputer. A week ago, we had an article here on a guy who'd wired several PS3s together and called it a supercomputer. Folks didn't agree with the supercomputer designation, even though he was getting flops that would clearly have been supercomputer speed just five or six years ago. It's not speed that defines a supercomputer, it's speed relative to what's commonly available.
If we crunch down machines to incredibly small size, then research institutions will buy one 50 times that size. Every time. What will happen is that that tech (if it's not expensive) will drive PC speeds up, perhaps phenomenally, software development tools will make use of the extra speed to make programming easier at the expense of run-time, and we won't see significant speed increases in the user experience. The user will be able to do more, of course, but he'll be complaining "When I speak into the microphone to tell it to write a three page synopsis of this book in it's library, it stalls and lags, and sometimes I tell it twice, before I get a response, and then it gives me two outputs. This thing is SLOW."
No, really. An iPhone is much more powerful than the Cray-1, and probably significantly more powerful than a Cray X-MP. The iPhone certainly has much more RAM and storage than they typical early Crays; I can’t be bothered right now to find out what kind of MFLOP performance an iPhone has.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
Sweet informative mod.
Technically, isn't my cell phone a super-computer by the standards of previous generations? Or is it not a matter of processor horsepower but the size of the bus?
The analogy I've seen comparing big iron midrange and mainframes vs. PC's is "Yeah, the PC is zippy, but it's like a ninja bike. The big iron is like a dump truck. The midrange isn't going to get up to speed as quickly but it's going to be doing a hell of a lot more for the effort."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
A quick google search appears to show modern PDAs competing nicely with a mid-80's Cray.
We won't have handheld supercomputers ever. If you have a handheld supercomputer, you can have a cluster of them, or better yet, a desktop sized computer so you're not wasting space with screens, batteries, and casings. Until the input/output problem for tiny devices is solved, handhelds will be PDAs and game devices (maybe doing neat things that today's desktops do, but very few will use them to try to crack the latest encryption algorithm).
What was that that just flew by me? Oh yeah! It was the vapor that is this article!
The game.
I recently picked up a Nokia 770. This device came out a couple years ago, say 2005. In 1985, I worked with a CDC Cyber 205 supercomputer. So, this is really 20 years, not 15. I have benchmark results for both, so why not compare?
The Nokia has 64 MB RAM. The '205 had 16 MB RAM. The Nokia kicks scaler code at about 40 to 100 MIPS. The '205 kicked scaler code at 35 to 70 MIPS. The Nokia has a DSP, which seems to be able to kick about 200 MFLOPS (i could be wrong). The '205 had twin vector pipes with a peak performance of 200 MFLOPS each, but it was rare to get more than 80% of that. My point is that they're comparable. The Nokia came with 192 MB file store, but now has 2.1 GB, and can mount my desktop filesystems over WiFi with better than 1 MB/sec throughput. The '205 had about 1 GB disk, and could mount mag tapes. Both sport native compilers for C, Fortran, etc. The Nokia was about $150. The '205 was about $15,000,000. That's a factor of 100,000 improvement in price/performance. The Nokia runs on batteries and fits in my shirt pocket, with the form factor of my old Palm Pilot. The '205 had a motor-generator power conditioner (the flywheel acts like a battery in power failure) and fit in large machine room with temperature and humidity carefully controlled.
Would i call the Nokia a supercomputer? No. Supercomputers cost more than a million dollars when they are new. Would i build a beowulf cluster of Nokia's? Maybe. With WiFi, one might put together an ad-hoc grid pretty easily. I only have one. But my 4 year old desktop is more than 30 times faster, so it's going to be hard to justify from a pure performance standpoint. Yes, my desktop has better price/performance than the Nokia.
I've not yet run a SETI@Home unit on the Nokia. It'd be much better than the one i ran on the 486/33...
-- Stephen.
Aye, lad, of course you can imagine a beowulf cluster of these. But that's the easy part. Everyone can do that these days. Why my nephew could imagine a beowulf cluster on a good day, and he's a toddler.
Now try imagining cooling it. That's the real challenge. That's what makes grown up men cry like little girls.
I mean, look 15 years back in time. That was in 1992. We still had desktop cases without fans (except maybe on the PSU, though even there not on all), CPUs without heatsinks (and in fact, the chip even included in a big slab of resin or such and it made no difference to cooling anyway), and computers could safely run on PSUs whose wattage was a 2 digit number. We also still had RAM fast enough that you didn't need a CPU cache (nor had a transistor budget for it, anyway). And we thought that a program that takes a whole floppy is bloated. Etc.
So I'm going to put on my wizard hat and rub the ol' crystal ball, and tell you how I see computing in the future.
- seein' as case fans started from none, and now we're at two or more 120mm fams and ducts per case, I see the computer of the future as a cube, whose whole face (or maybe side) is one big 14" fan (yes, inch, not cm) blowing air in and another in the back blowing it out. In fact, it will all be one big square wind tunnel, or an oversized hair dryer.
You'll alos be advised to not put anything more flammable than asbestos behind it, and fence it so your cat or toddler can't get behind the computer and get cooked.
- a decent power supply will be around 3-4 kilowatts, but Nvidia will recommend 5 kW for their latest graphics card, more if you run a SLI setup.
- or maybe water cooling will become the standard, and the computer will nicely double as a samovar and espresso machine.
- heatsinks will be made of pure silver. And ATI will still need something that sounds like a jet fighter at takeofff to keep their GPU at only 90C.
- continuing the trend, graphics cards will keep needing increasingly more dedicated power connectors, and increasingly more pins on them. We started at 1 with 4 pins, and now we're at "ATI won't activate this or that function if you don't have 8 pins on the second power connector." I foresee that in 15 years we'll be at 6 power connectors with 16 pins each, just to bring enough current to the graphics card.
- still noone will have invented a better use of all that silicone than adding yet another core, so given that 15 years is no less than 10 cycles of Moore's Law, you'll have anywhere between 2048 and 4096 cores in your PC. More time will be spent passing messages between those and serilizing access to data, in algorithms that were never meant to be massively parallel, than actually computing the useful part. People will still argue that it's the fault of game programmers that they don't split processing 5 NPCs between 2048 CPUs, or for that matter, the fault of compiler makers that they insist on reading the file sequentially instead of each core processing every 2048'th line of the file.
- We'll be up to, oh, maybe DDR9, or maybe some newer standard. It still won't have lower latency in nanoseconds than the old SDR, but people will still buy it based on theoretical burst speed. Even more ridiculously larger caches will be needed just to keep all those cores working at all, instead of spending thousands of cycles waiting for the RAM to finally answer. On the bright side, though, we'll have enough budget of transistors form 2 to 4 gigabytes of cache on the CPU.
- As that trend continues, eventually the disparity between RAM and CPU will get so high that it will be entirely feasible to skip RAM completely, and run the programs off the hard drive and the CPU's L3 cache. (The disparity between CPU speed and RAM latency is _already_ as big as that between the 8088 in the IBM PC/XT and the hard drive it had.)
- People will still take the extra power as an invitation to write bloated and slow code. So even th
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