[HN Gopher] A Quadrillion Mainframes on Your Lap
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A Quadrillion Mainframes on Your Lap
Author : TheBombe
Score : 39 points
Date : 2021-12-21 21:26 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| That sounds pretty cool. Let's redo it in Electron.
|
| \s
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| All that processing power so that people can stream "Ow my b***s"
| in 4k and order Brawndo.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| but at the same time software bloating basically voided that
| increase of computing power...
| Guest42 wrote:
| Agreed, I am amazed at how often I hear of a few million rows
| being considered a large table.
| PTOB wrote:
| It's not the rows that kill you. It's the columns.
| runnerup wrote:
| This thought has a very narrow perspective. During the space
| program, a few million rows was very large. Today, you have
| better tools so a few million rows is small to you. But
| someone else who works on Fugaku has tools that you don't
| have and will find that your "large" amount of data is small
| to them -- they also get to use the electrical equivalent of
| 20,000 homes to process that data.
|
| Most people today don't have the computing tools that you do.
| Yes, a consumer laptop running Numpy can process it quickly.
| But they have Excel, not Numpy...and Excel cannot process
| millions of rows. So in the context of the tools they have,
| it is a large table.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Lets not kid ourselves, a few million rows is not small
| either and if not done properly can quickly become a system's
| bottleneck. But it's not humongous either. Depending on ones
| perspective it could be seen as medium or large but certainly
| not small.
| nomel wrote:
| I think it's safe to call anything that fits within the
| memory of a mid range notebook computer "small". I guess it
| depends on how wide those tables are.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Unless your laptop has 128GB of ram, it's not even a million
| 7090s.
|
| CPU time is essentially free now. When you price e.g. cloud
| instances you can nearly ignore everything except RAM and non-
| volatile storage. If you want more than 16GB of ram you need to
| go for the "mobile workstation" class devices.
| dijit wrote:
| CPU time is far from free unless you never needed it. W.r.t
| cloud pricing the expense (ime) goes:
|
| CPU > Ram > Network > Disk(even the fastest).
|
| That's at least the most difference compared to a normal server
| or even a desktop. The markup on CPU cores in the cloud is
| insane.
| facorreia wrote:
| For the curious, I found this manual[1] about programming the IBM
| 7090 (the mainframe mentioned in the article).
|
| The machine language and corresponding assembly code is still
| recognizable by today's standards. It looks pretty similar to the
| Z-80, 6502 and 8086 assembly that I learned back in the day.
|
| [1]https://justine.lol/sectorlisp/ibm709.pdf
| rbanffy wrote:
| A quadrillion ancient mainframes. A couple trillion PCs, I'd
| guess.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Incidentally this is why you should be extremely skeptical of
| predictions by pure academics about the attainability of certain
| performance _at a given price_. It was the simultaneous increase
| in performance, and collapse in cost per transistor that only
| business at scale could deliver... that made Roy Lightfoot and
| his American contemporaries look foolish just a couple of decades
| later.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Curious about the wording of this title, is there code you could
| write that represents each of the quadrillion mainframes on your
| laptop.
| fredrikholm wrote:
| I vividly remember the moment I was reading about the IBM
| mainframes used by NASA during the 1960s, trying to convert the
| words of memory from the amount of bits the system used, to
| something more modern to give me some perspective.
|
| Naturally, I fired up [Microsoft] Calculator, and arrived at
| something like 4kb. Later, I had to force quit a stalled process
| and opened Task Manager, to find that I had forgot to close
| Calculator.
|
| There it was, idling at 20mb. Initially, I thought perhaps it was
| slowly leaking memory, so I restarted it. Just the same.
|
| Now, I can already anticipate someone motivating why a calculator
| needs to exceed the computing power of calculating ~5000 space
| programs. To that I say, Windows 95 runs at 4mb of memory.
| Microsoft Calculator is not more complex than Windows 95. At
| least, I deeply hope that it isn't.
| dijit wrote:
| It is not impossible that a large amount of that memory is for
| rendering high resolution images and glyphs.
|
| Resolution does nasty things to memory.
|
| As does having every memory allocation be 64bits wide (instead
| of 8 or 16).
|
| Though I agree with your sentiment.
| ithkuil wrote:
| How do you waste memory? First, one bit at a time, then one
| gigabyte at a time.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| I think a downvote on this is unfair. Excessive memory
| usage starts in the data model. And yea, a difference of a
| few bytes there can quickly stack up (sorry for pun).
| gbertasius wrote:
| Last I checked the new calculator has graphing and math
| notation support.
| gglitch wrote:
| Interesting that the author concludes his otherwise interesting
| observations by discussing the advanced processing power of the
| iPhone. I don't dispute the numbers or the results, but when I
| want to do actual work, I choose my aged Linux laptop every time.
| The iPhone feels more like a thin client to someone else's power.
| dijit wrote:
| This is a limitation of the OS though. The CPUs are the fastest
| JavaScript rendering CPUs that exist at any power consumption
| point.
|
| I think that's why people are so amped about the M1 (and
| getting Linux into it)
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