The modern version of this is AI datacenters.
In an amount of years all the crap they are taking up tons of racks for will fit in a cell phone and cost next to nothing.
Not an electrical or computer engineer so I can’t really speak on the limits of miniaturizing hardware in terms of physics or technological ability. But even if you can fit a full computer on a fingernail, it’s gonna be hard to have a even just a USB-C connector on a finger nail. At a certain point, there’s little reason to miniaturize computers further when they still have to interface with human usable devices. Instead of miniaturizing the board further, continuing to increase transistor density on the cpu and chips to get more compute power in the same area seems like the obvious focus for future miniaturization efforts.
Some jokes never stop being accurate.
Positive example of a shrinkflation.
You have the ESP ones, hard to go much much lower without it being impractical (but there are loads of smaller too).
You can’t hump a PCB after everyone else has gone home though.
I absolutely can and did. It vibrated and I had a really nice time.
You really doubled down on that pun. There should be a law about that.
Careful, you might get that Murphy guys attention with this law talk.
Good God has it been 11 years since that meme?
Gangnam style is 14 years old
Ok that’s uncalled for sir.
Sorry, I’m 14
AI was 59 in 2015
It’s been 84 years…
Now you can wear a full desktop PC on your wrist with 0.7nm chip
Well, it’ll be a pretty small chip if the entire thing has to fit on your wrist, so still not equivalent to a 0.7nm desktop chip. They don’t generally make the chips smaller, the feature size gets smaller so they can fit more transistors in the same die area
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_803
Another unusual feature is the use of magnetic cores not only for memory but also as logic gates. These logic cores have 1, 2 or 3 input windings, a trigger (read) and an output winding. Depending on their polarity, current pulses in the input windings either magnetise the core or cancel each other out. The magnetised state of the core indicates the result of a boolean logic function.
Huh. Clever.
Cost about £500,000 in today’s money. If the AI bubble hasn’t popped by this time next year, that Raspberry Pi might cost about the same.
A picture similar to this one was on one of my high school text books. Inside the cover was a description of it as magnetic core computer memory. For quite a long time I thought this is what computer chips looked like. The only issue was I was in high school in the 80s, long after such memory was used. Maybe the text book was 15 years old, I don’t know.
First computer company I worked for was still using it in the early 80s. Slow, but it retained state after a power failure.
Check this out. Very cool.
Though not a fan of his reasoning to have it in silicone oil. The computers back then also didn’t do that, and they had rougher measuring tooling.
He just wanted a oil-submerged thingy anyway.Yeah, absolutely. Just a fun and cool project.
I knew this was gonna be polymatt! What a great vid.
TL;DW: He makes a memory core from “scratch”
if that’s truly from 1957, the whole setup would have several pieces that size. the 803 a few years later was three (one about this size, two a little smaller), plus user console, printer, tape reader. nearly 2000 lbs worth of equipment.
To be fair the Pi has no peripheral (keyboard, screen…) either.
I don’t know but my supposition is that the ras pi pictured is several powers of magnitude more powerful than the 803.
It certainly is.
From the wiki:
“It uses ferrite magnetic-core memory in 4096 or 8192 words of 40 bits, comprising 39 bits of data with parity.”
So a whooping 39kB of memory on the largest option!
“Tape is read at 500 characters per second and punched at 100 cps.”
Compare that with a micro-SD…
“The bit time is 6 microseconds, jumps execute in 288 microseconds and simple arithmetic instructions in 576 microseconds.”
And it run and an incredible speed of 1 to 3kHz!
(And this is overselling the computer, it was slower than what the numbers appear.)
imagine a tape punch going at 100cps though… even if it’s just stamping baudot code that’s still 500 actuations per second. that’s fuckin terrifying.
Not a thing you want your service without a good LOTO scheme.
probably loud af too
oh absolutely, dot matrix printer times 10
Actually insane that it is so powerful at that time, without transistors.
That’s the same size box my new video card just came in.
and all that was inside was a smelly shoe with a can of soup stuffed in it. thanks amazon.
You could just do the soc, it would probably be closer to feature parity.
