• bitofhope@awful.systems
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    11 months ago

    During WWII everyone computed on slide rules which had zero transistors. Then they invented the transistor which had one transistor. Then they started making mainframes and Ataris and C64s which had like what, hundred or thousand? Then they invented computers and Windows and PS1 that had maybe a million transistors. And then we got dual core CPUs which had double the transistors per transistor. Then they invented GPUs which is like a thousand tiny CPUs in one CPU. Then they made i7 which probably has like a billion transistors and Ryzen which has ten billion and RTX4090 Ti has 79 billion. Now they say China is going to make a phone with trillion transistors.

    That’s called exponential growth and assuming perfectly spherical frictionless nanometers it will go on forever. In eight to twelve years schoolchildren will be running GPT6 on their calculators. We will build our houses entirely out of graphics cards. AI will figure out cold fusion any week now and Dennard scaling will never hit its limit, right?