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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention, physical limits to lithography are slowing down significantly... so tech will continue to evolve more slowly... it'll never be the jump from 1080-1990 again, for example, even though 1990-2000 was pretty close, 2000-2010 much slower and since 2010 slower still.

What's as or more weird is how much hardware is backordered, and how much live hardware is allocated, but waiting on facilities for operation. And how many facilities are years behind at this point already... all on various credit and dept swaps between all the involved companies... it's not just a balloon, it's a house of cards balanced on a balloon.

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The process node size in William the Conqueror's time was really off the charts.

Plotting that backwards shows a transistor would be the size of a continent, at least.

> Plotting that backwards shows a transistor would be the size of a continent, at least.

Means that the computer would be the size of earth... maybe the mice really were onto something :-)

The infamous attention is all you need paper has this: "The Transformer ... reach a new state of the art in translation quality after being trained for as little as twelve hours on eight P100 GPUs.", the p100 is now quite a bit under 100$ and that's from a time where nvidia was valued 100x less than it is today. Lets wait and see

> since 2010 slower still

The increase in PFLOPS/dollar has continued accelerating, a lot from process, but also a lot by simplifying the architecture- if you had placed an H100 worth of transistors on a CPU-like architecture, you wouldn’t reach the same peak performances.

Beating the GPU performance bump from 1080-1990 would be hard indeed...

lol, meant 1980....

supposedly, the next step is into fiber & optics.

but I generally agree, people put a lot of faith in the exponential leaps vs the exponential space.

You tell them we're not living on mars any time soon and they'll bring up christopher columbus.

How would fiber and optics help if the bottleneck is computation efficiency and not data transfer?

the optics are doing the gates. literally, shine a light down a path and uts doing calcs.

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