On Thu, 12 Jun 2014 09:06:50 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Thu, 12 Jun 2014 12:16:08 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: > >> On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 12:08 PM, Steven D'Aprano >> <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >>> I'm just pointing out that our computational technology uses over a >>> million times more energy than the theoretical minimum, and therefore >>> there is a lot of room for efficiency gains without sacrificing >>> computer power. I never imagined that such viewpoint would turn out to >>> be so controversial. >> >> The way I understand it, you're citing an extremely theoretical >> minimum, >> in the same way that one can point out that we're a long way from >> maximum entropy in a flash memory chip, so it ought to be possible to >> pack a lot more data onto a USB stick. > > Um, yes? > > Hands up anyone who thinks that today's generation of USB sticks will be > the highest capacity ever, that all progress in packing more memory into > a thumb drive (or the same memory into a smaller drive) will cease > effective immediately? > > Anyone? > > >> The laws of physics tend to put boundaries that are ridiculously far >> from where we actually work - I think most roads have speed limits that >> run a fairly long way short of c. > > "186,000 miles per second: not just a good idea, it's the law" > > > There's no *law of physics* that says cars can only travel at the speeds > they do. Compare how fast a typical racing car goes with the typical > 60kph speed limit in suburban Melbourne. Now compare how fast the > Hennessey Venom GT goes to that speed limit. > > http://www.autosaur.com/fastest-car-in-the-world/?PageSpeed=noscript > > > Speed limits for human-piloted ground-based transport ("cars") are more > based on social and biological factors than engineering ones. Similarly, > there are biological factors that force keyboards to be a minimum size. > We probably could build a keyboard where the keys were 0.1mm square, but > what would be the point? Who could use it? Those social and biological > factors don't apply to computing efficiency, so it's only *engineering* > factors that prevent us from being able to run your server off a watch > battery, not the laws of physics. > > It is my contention that, had Intel and AMD spent the last few decades > optimizing for power consumption rather than speed, we probably could > run a server off, well, perhaps not a watch battery, but surely a factor > of 100 improvement in efficiency isn't unreasonable given that we're > just moving a picogram of electrons around?
but a 20 year old server would probably take a week to do what a current one does in an hour (random figures chosen for effect not accuracy). How does the power consumption compare on those time-scales, not to mention the cost of the wasted time? I would agree that for the average desk-top users modern processor performance exceeds that required by a considerable margin so perhaps optimising for power consumption is now possible, wait a minute arn't intel & AMD now developing lower powered processors? -- Breeding rabbits is a hare raising experience. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
