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Comment by llcoolv | Hacker News Reader

"‘SpiNNaker’ machine is capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second, with each of its chips having 100 million moving parts."

Could someone elaborate? I am probably missing something as I hadn't heard of moving parts on a solid-state device?

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I believe they are referring to the number of transistors per chip (which as you correctly state are not "moving parts"). Also, fun fact: these chips are 7+ years old now!

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6330636

The supply side of people who want to do journalism is full of so many people, and the competition for jobs sends most to other career fields. Yet the product of modern journalism is often so sad.

Is it because journalists are bad at doing their jobs, or is it because they do what their employers tell them to?

Maybe the journalist knows that transistors don't actually move, but thought that its still a useful analogy for the lay audience they target.

This is what caught me off guard - I also share this view on journalism and would not have been surprised, but this piece is published by the Uni of Manchester itself.

The press release office, as opposed to the researchers.

Our press office are definitely a law unto themselves, but the analogy was drawn in the event. It's also inaccurate, as it doesn't count the extra ~billion gates per chip for the memory (as that's just a co-packaged standard SDRAM module). It's just that we don't usually think about those as those SDRAMs are very reliable and don't cause us much trouble at all.

They could have been trying for a figure of speech. People sometimes say a complex problem or piece of code "has a lot of moving parts," so there's precedent for not taking "moving parts" literally. I agree it's awkward regardless.

I'm not sure this is "journalism". It's a product of university Communications, and by no means the worst example.

This isn't journalism, it's communication. It's a press release from the university. Both journalism and communication are subsets of "communications."

If this university is anything like the ones I went to, the press releases are written by journalism and communication students to give them some hands-on experience.

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