Are computers outdating themselves in the long run?

[Cr00zng]

The speed of 0's and 1's flipping and flopping through your processor and memory is the speed of LIGHT. Unfortunately, there is this thing called "Resistance" which slows that speed down, so when electricity flows through a circuit, we are limited by the actual construction of the CPU, Ram, and Motherboard, and all of the components on the MB.

Another word for "Resistance" is LATENCY - It takes

79.2 Nanoseconds for the bits to get from the Input of my Ram to the Output- And that's just my Ram according to my benchmark program.

So, our stuff gets HOT. P = IR where I is the speed of light and R is the amount of resistance of the circuit. This would be a Thevenization of all our PCs. New CPUS are made with lower and lower latency, but the factor is always TIME. And I believe TIME is always relevant to the observer.

The CPU is tossing Bits inside of itself at trhe speed of light, the the material of which the CPU is made slows it down. So the research always has to be about creating a CPU with lower and lower amounts of time it needs for a bit to get from one side to another. If the Bit was flying through space, it is always travelling at the speed of light.

So in the future the research would be finding a particle that can travel faster than light, and building a system that can use it to transfer Data. The Enterprise D has a Computer Core that is FTL:

Information about the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D

In the dreams of the guys who thought it up. But as long as we got guys around like Stephen Hawking who looks at that Warp Core Bucket and says "I'm Working on That" - There is a chance this kind of tech can be developed someday.

Maybe I am wrong, but..

The wire resistance impacts the heat generated by the current flowing through the given wire, but does not impact the actual speed of electrical current.

What impacts the speed is the electromagnetic field generated by the electric charge or electricity. Electricity in vacuum travel at the speed of light; even in air, it travels close to light speed. That's because the electromagnetic field generated by electricity practically encounters no resistance. That's one of the reason why high voltage wires are not insulated.

The insulated wire introduces resistance to the electromagnetic field and since the electricity cannot travel faster than the electromagnetic field, the speed of electricity reduced to the electromagnetic field's speed. In computer, most if not all wiring is insulated. From the printed circuit board to the components, such as CPU, memory, video card, etc., all of them are insulated. Depending on the type insulation, the speed of electricity could be reduced by as much as 50%, or more.

The speed of light can be approximated as a foot per nanosecond; the 50% reduction is 6" per nanosecond, which is still plenty fast, when the insulation is accounted for. The CPU may have the longest internal circuit as 3", while the peripherals might be as far as over a foot away. Even if the peripherals would be as fast as the CPU, which they are not, they'd be about four times slower to respond than the CPU would, due to the insulation reduced speed of electricity.

 

[CountMike]

Compatibility is hanging around the necks of both, hardware and software manufacturers, as in yesterday, today and future HW and SW developments. There's just too large base of all of this things to be able to just discard all the stuff and succeed immediately and on the similarly large scale push something brand new and revolutionary so that all the stuff until that time disappears. What are the chances that this happens ? NILL. Not so long ago every computer manufacturer had own OS, programs, parts and at some time they all but disappeared and de-facto only 2 standards were left, one of them stayed closed and the other one fully open. Guess which one took largest part of the market ?
Now again, everybody and his brother wants to have own OS apps etc. and we are just paying and paying.

 

[XweAponX]

Maybe I am wrong, but..

The wire resistance impacts the heat generated by the current flowing through the given wire, but does not impact the actual speed of electrical current.

Yes, you are Wrong, the wire has resistance just like a resistor. All conductors will have a value of RESISTANCE included in their specs, when you buy spools of wire from Mouser, you can order wire by the value of this resistance. Some wire has mroe resistance than others, depending on what it is made out of. Usually good old Copper. But there are new conductors being used, Fiber Optics, which are used in Broadband connections.

What impacts the speed is the electromagnetic field generated by the electric charge or electricity. Electricity in vacuum travel at the speed of light; even in air, it travels close to light speed. That's because the electromagnetic field generated by electricity practically encounters no resistance. That's one of the reason why high voltage wires are not insulated.

That is called INDUCTIVE REACTANCE, it's part of the IMPEDANCE. Word "IMPEDE" Meaning to hamper. Impedance is the combined Resistance, Inductive Reactance, and Inductive Capacitance of a circuit or component, labelled as Z. P = IZ as much as P = IR, it's simpler to thevenise this as R rather than Z. Electricity always travels at the speed of light but when travelling through the earth's atmosphere it's about 0.8 c due to factors in the atmosphere. When travelling through a wire, it is hampered by about the same amount. But the speed of an electron is constant.

The insulated wire introduces resistance to the electromagnetic field and since the electricity cannot travel faster than the electromagnetic field, the speed of electricity reduced to the electromagnetic field's speed. In computer, most if not all wiring is insulated. From the printed circuit board to the components, such as CPU, memory, video card, etc., all of them are insulated. Depending on the type insulation, the speed of electricity could be reduced by as much as 50%, or more.

In as much as the Inductive Reactance which is what you are talking about here acts as Resistance, yes.

The speed of light can be approximated as a foot per nanosecond; the 50% reduction is 6" per nanosecond, which is still plenty fast, when the insulation is accounted for. The CPU may have the longest internal circuit as 3", while the peripherals might be as far as over a foot away. Even if the peripherals would be as fast as the CPU, which they are not, they'd be about four times slower to respond than the CPU would, due to the insulation reduced speed of electricity.

All of the components of a system combine to slow it to the crawl of a Packard Bell Computer made with floor sweepings as components. As a former engineer, I know good components and bad components. Electrolytic Capacitors, cheap ceramic resistors, motherboards nowadays don't use those as much. That's why I buy Asus boards only now, when I used to buy only MSI boards, they would always fail in a year's time, usually by the Electrolytic Caps exploding.

Actually, the component which will cause a lot of degradation in a system is the Graphics Card. Many new cards have processors that are close to the speeds of the CPUs in the host machines. My GPU in this machine is only running as 576mhz and it has 512mb DDR2 Ram. It's a cheap card. Hi Performance Cards will have lots of Heat Dissipation on them, because they have GPU's that are faster and faster RAM and more of it. My card, because it is trying to keep up with what my processor shoves at it, get s really HOT, about 200 F. The GPU Diode is 150 right now which is the coolest it has been for a few days. Actually, heat will degrade the system more than any other aspect, but Heat itself is caused by the same EM which is caused by the flow of electricity through a conductor. If there were no conductive material in the wire, it wouldn't happen, so the actual resistance value of the copper wire adds to the EM created and therefore adds to the Heat created by the system.

So, clearly what we need for computing is a way of transferring power that is not affected by things like the Resistance of a Wire and the Inductive Reactance or Capacitance of it. We need an Insulator that will also insulate the Magnetic Fields created by Electricity travelling down a wire. And a way to isolate components on a board from each other. Heat Dissipation that can change that heat back into Energy and put it back in the System.

I don't see no EPS Waveguides on top of Power Poles, I don't see no EPS Power Taps in our houses in place of AC Sockets. Not yet, at least. And not one damn Force Field either!

Oh Yah, Power through Hi-Power Lines, is send at a high value of Voltage, the higher the voltage the lower the current. That's why Guitar Amps that use Power Tubes are still popular, better power transfer. The Voltage is about 300 Vac inside the tubes, the current is very low comparatively. gets stepped down to 12VDC at a much higher amount of current into the Speaker, thats why I blow out so many Celestion Speakers.

In the same way those High Voltage lines have a very low amount of current, possibly Microamps. It's not VOLTAGE that will kill a man, it is Current, and usually 20 mA will do it - And that can be supplied from a 9 volt battery.

So anyway, whether it is actual resistance of the conductors inside the PC or Inductive caused by EM fields, it's still slowing the speed of those electrons, and in slowing them down, causing them to heat up. That's also the biggest detriment to a system, it's always HEAT.

 

[CountMike]

It's not only resistance and current speed , all semi conductors have a certain latency while changing states, Put together thousands of those "switches" in series with each switch taking it's own sweet time to turn on, pass that to large numbers of other ones and so on. Now lets add to that software reaction and it's workings of which every byte has to be checked, memory for it alocated checked if and what is in the cashes etc and all of it at various levels of which some have to translate to others. Throw now and then a HDD and its data that has to be read and throw it in the cogs of the wheels and we'll see that speed the current flows between those components is the least of the problem.

 

[XweAponX]

Not the least, but how well all those other things work depend on the conductance of a circuit and it's connection to all of those things.

Electrical Conductance is half of the problem, the other half are those other aspects, which most of them depend directly on Electrical Current, the speed of trhe current and quality of it. If you've ever looked at a Computer Data Signal inside of a Computer at Various Points, on a Oscilloscope, you will see how degraded the signal can get. If you look at the signal going IN to the Hard Drive or CPU or Memory, and coming OUT, sometimes it's not a nice 5 V or 0 V signal, there will be distortions in the signal that the elements you are referring to could misread as a "1" then it is not a "1" - It may just be an energy spike. That's why they BUILD those redundancy checkers into the system.

 

[SpyderBite]

I remember having this conversation with my uncle back in 1983 as we were soldering 256k dimm in to our TSR-80 so I could use the 64k dimm in my TI-994a. ^^

 

[CountMike]

I remember having this conversation with my uncle back in 1983 as we were soldering 256k dimm in to our TSR-80 so I could use the 64k dimm in my TI-994a. ^^

256 K ? I was really amazed at results I got when I put 16K module in My Timex-Sinclair ZX that had whole 2 K originally and that was double the original Sinclair had, whole 1K.

 

[XweAponX]

I remember having this conversation with my uncle back in 1983 as we were soldering 256k dimm in to our TSR-80 so I could use the 64k dimm in my TI-994a. ^^

Haha! I remember a derogatory nickname for those - Radio Shack made em right?

My first computer was an original IBM PC-XT with the RGB Monitor and a hercules graphics card, I went out and bought the Math Coprocessor so I could run AutoCAD 10. I don't remember if the original 640k of ram was actually soldered down on to the MB. I had a whopping 20 mb WD hard drive, probably the first product they ever made. I had a Summagraphics Tablet plugged into it, wish I still had it.

 

[robinpe]

I think you will find that with the potential use of 'graphene' in computers, in such things as electrical circuits & integrated circuits, with its high carrier mobility, touchscreens, etc., speeds will increase tremendously. Much development of this 'wonder' material has been done since the award to the two scientists from the University of Manchester, with the Nobel Peace prize in Physics in 2010. Now in 2013 a billion euros has been awarded by the European Union to researchers led by a Swedish professor. I believe it will have many uses in computer hardware design in the very near future.

 

[caperjack]

Well Lehnerus,

Computers are like cars. I can drive with a small Toyota from Miami to Orlando and someone does this with a Porsche. Thanks to the speed limit and traffic the Porsche will not get faster in Orlando.

good one !
,i use a older dell optiplex 745 core2 duo, ,about 5 years old or so, and at the end of the day i get all done what i need to have done,and more ,and the past 4 years of updates in computer hardware/software a lot of people already have, I still have it to look forward too.when the money is available

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
simple answer is NO --it's what WE do with them that drives faster / cheaper / less energy hungry components.

We've hardly started on intelligent robotics, true VR and holographic projection yet --these devices will require a logarithmic increase in processing power over what we have now.

True for accessing email - web surfing etc almost any old machine can be used but that's not what is at issue here.

Incidentally as far as robotics are concerned even now we are rapidly approaching the point where artificial limbs etc can perform BETTER than HUMAN one's -- so I can imagine a time probably not too far away in the future and certainly within this century when the Paralympics will need a TOTALLY different set of rules and some of the records broken will exceed those in the "Standard" competition.

In order to design and test these types of things of course computers will be needed - and those will have to have incredibly improved processing speeds, and OS's capable of interacting with any sort of "Hardware" including biological.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[XweAponX]

I think you will find that with the potential use of 'graphene' in computers, in such things as electrical circuits & integrated circuits, with its high carrier mobility, touchscreens, etc., speeds will increase tremendously. Much development of this 'wonder' material has been done since the award to the two scientists from the University of Manchester, with the Nobel Peace prize in Physics in 2010. Now in 2013 a billion euros has been awarded by the European Union to researchers led by a Swedish professor. I believe it will have many uses in computer hardware design in the very near future.

That's what I'm talking about - New materials for new science, is what will make puters go faster.

A Computer can do basic math functions many times faster than we can do them in our heads, except for some Rain-Men, but a computer basically cannot THINK as fast as a human being can, and cannot think in the same way a human can. In a way, computers are not even as intelligent as Insects. It would take an unprecedented array of processors connected in parallel to get a computer to pass the Turing test.

Voyager introduced this idea of "Bio-Neural BrainGel Packs" that allowed data to move as fast as it does in a biological entity. The Enterprise D's main computer gave birth to an Emergent Intelligence, using the whole ship to make itself.

I believe these are things that can happen if we ever develop the technology.

More on Graphene:

Graphene - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[XweAponX]

Hi there
simple answer is NO --it's what WE do with them that drives faster / cheaper / less energy hungry components.

We've hardly started on intelligent robotics, true VR and holographic projection yet --these devices will require a logarithmic increase in processing power over what we have now.

True for accessing email - web surfing etc almost any old machine can be used but that's not what is at issue here.

Incidentally as far as robotics are concerned even now we are rapidly approaching the point where artificial limbs etc can perform BETTER than HUMAN one's -- so I can imagine a time probably not too far away in the future and certainly within this century when the Paralympics will need a TOTALLY different set of rules and some of the records broken will exceed those in the "Standard" competition.

In order to design and test these types of things of course computers will be needed - and those will have to have incredibly improved processing speeds, and OS's capable of interacting with any sort of "Hardware" including biological.

Cheers
jimbo

"The Schizoid Man" - St: TNG season 2 ep 6

"Star Trek: The Next Generation" The Schizoid Man (1989) (btw, the Review that is shown on the page is one of mine)

Dr Ira Graves figures out how to stick his MIND into Data's Positronic Net.

Ok, we know Positrons exist - But can they be used to make a Computing device? The answer is probably going to be YES:

Scientists Create First Memristor: Missing Fourth Electronic Circuit Element | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

The Positronic Brain Is On It's Way - Sag Rising

Ok, so Graves successfully sticks his consciousness into Data, unfortunately this was an invasion and unethical to take over a brain and a body belonging to someone else. The Process caused a Dissociative personality to develope. Graves dumped the raw data of his knowledge into the Enterprise Puter.

They should have made a Holographic Body for him, and stuck him in the Holodeck so he could hang out with the intelligent Moriarty Hologram, that way Moriarty would not have been so pissed off enough to take over the ship again.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Well Lehnerus,

Computers are like cars. I can drive with a small Toyota from Miami to Orlando and someone does this with a Porsche. Thanks to the speed limit and traffic the Porsche will not get faster in Orlando.

good one !
,i use a older dell optiplex 745 core2 duo, ,about 5 years old or so, and at the end of the day i get all done what i need to have done,and more ,and the past 4 years of updates in computer hardware/software a lot of people already have, I still have it to look forward too.when the money is available

Cars can't be split into pieces, so that they can do sections of the entire journey in parallel.

 

[CountMike]

Well Lehnerus,

Computers are like cars. I can drive with a small Toyota from Miami to Orlando and someone does this with a Porsche. Thanks to the speed limit and traffic the Porsche will not get faster in Orlando.

good one !
,i use a older dell optiplex 745 core2 duo, ,about 5 years old or so, and at the end of the day i get all done what i need to have done,and more ,and the past 4 years of updates in computer hardware/software a lot of people already have, I still have it to look forward too.when the money is available

Cars can't be split into pieces, so that they can do sections of the entire journey in parallel.

Hmmmm. the age old question, if one ship crosses the ocean in 7 days, how long it takes 4 ships to do the same thing.

 

[XweAponX]

If I'm paddling my canoe down the street and the wheel falls off, how many pancakes will a dump truck hold?

Six - Because ICE CREAM has No BONES!

 

[caperjack]

Six - Because ICE CREAM has No BONES!

my all time favorite is ,
why are oranges ,because snakes have no armpits

 

[XweAponX]

What's the difference between a duck?

 

[XweAponX]

my all time favorite is,
why are oranges, because snakes have no armpits

-HAHAHAHA! Good one

 

[XweAponX]

Hmmmm. the age old question, if one ship crosses the ocean in 7 days, how long it takes 4 ships to do the same thing.

7 Days - But they can do 4 times as much as ONE ship. Carry more people, have more swimming pools, or collect more money from people on World Cruises. Concept is the same.