<story><title>I.B.M. Reports Nanotube Chip Breakthrough</title><url>http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/i-b-m-reports-nanotube-chip-breakthrough/?hp&amp;pagewanted=all</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>abtinf</author><text>Articles like this used to excite me. But now, they are just sort of depressing.&lt;p&gt;Would it be good to have denser transistor counts? Sure. There are lots of benefits for hardware. Denser transistors can mean (possibly) reduced power consumption from smaller chips. Manufacturing costs are reduced because you get more chips from the same materials. Device production costs are reduced because you can combine functions that used to take two chips into a single chip. Overall devices can be smaller.&lt;p&gt;But from a software perspective, its a limited blessing. To be sure, there are benefits for cloud computing applications and other &quot;embarrassingly parallel&quot; applications. These chips might be great in data centers, which are power sensitive. And being able to do more things at once can be good, even if its at the same speed - Google can maybe crawl the web more frequently and video games might get improved graphics.&lt;p&gt;But the thing is, we already have nearly unlimited computing power at our disposal. On a whim, I could spin up a hundred thousand computers on Amazon Web Services to do some desired computation (which would cost a mere $700/hr at the current spot prices). My laptop has a 192 core GPU which, by itself, is more powerful than most super computers that existed up to the mid-1990s.&lt;p&gt;What we really need are software advances to exploit this hardware. For decades, there has been essentially no progress whatever in software that can take advantage of parallel computing. What techniques we have are either brittle (threads) or forfeit most of the hardware&apos;s power (multiple processes combined with relatively slow inter-process communication). Software is in such a backward state that people are amazed when the home-screen icons on an iphone scroll smoothly from page to page.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Mitt</author><text>“we already have nearly unlimited computing power at our disposal”
I have to disagree. To tackle hard problems I would be glad to have a billion times more computational power.
We are doing semantic processing of texts. For one customer we have a million texts, and processing one takes about one second. To have the computer automatically generate rules (Genetic Programming) we would like to have this:
the computer generates a rule, processes the million texts, and checks if that rule improved the overall understanding. Currently one million processing seconds are required.
But if we could do this on one million cores, we could generate one rule per second. The thing is: an evolutionary system will generate millions and millions of rules. So, even if we had a million times more computational power, it would still require several months to finish a run. Renting such capacity from Amazon &amp;#38; Co. would cost easily 5-10 millions.
With a billion times more computational power however this would fall in the range of perhaps a few thousand dollars.&lt;p&gt;Also, it would be useful, if mobile phones would feature such a computational power, so that strong AI software with above human intelligence could run on it. Such software could technically run on a C64 if enough memory were available, but answers would take quite a long time.&lt;p&gt;So, I really hope that we will see maaany trillion times more computational power in this century.</text></comment>
<story><title>I.B.M. Reports Nanotube Chip Breakthrough</title><url>http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/i-b-m-reports-nanotube-chip-breakthrough/?hp&amp;pagewanted=all</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>abtinf</author><text>Articles like this used to excite me. But now, they are just sort of depressing.&lt;p&gt;Would it be good to have denser transistor counts? Sure. There are lots of benefits for hardware. Denser transistors can mean (possibly) reduced power consumption from smaller chips. Manufacturing costs are reduced because you get more chips from the same materials. Device production costs are reduced because you can combine functions that used to take two chips into a single chip. Overall devices can be smaller.&lt;p&gt;But from a software perspective, its a limited blessing. To be sure, there are benefits for cloud computing applications and other &quot;embarrassingly parallel&quot; applications. These chips might be great in data centers, which are power sensitive. And being able to do more things at once can be good, even if its at the same speed - Google can maybe crawl the web more frequently and video games might get improved graphics.&lt;p&gt;But the thing is, we already have nearly unlimited computing power at our disposal. On a whim, I could spin up a hundred thousand computers on Amazon Web Services to do some desired computation (which would cost a mere $700/hr at the current spot prices). My laptop has a 192 core GPU which, by itself, is more powerful than most super computers that existed up to the mid-1990s.&lt;p&gt;What we really need are software advances to exploit this hardware. For decades, there has been essentially no progress whatever in software that can take advantage of parallel computing. What techniques we have are either brittle (threads) or forfeit most of the hardware&apos;s power (multiple processes combined with relatively slow inter-process communication). Software is in such a backward state that people are amazed when the home-screen icons on an iphone scroll smoothly from page to page.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>csomar</author><text>I used to think this way, but it&apos;s better to give it another perspective. IBM (or their research group) specializes in Hardware and they are making good progress. They can&apos;t do both in the same time.&lt;p&gt;Someone else has to do the Software hacking. But if there isn&apos;t someone doing it (or at least meeting your expectations), then it doesn&apos;t mean IBM should stop or change activity.&lt;p&gt;Any progress we make is a win for us and for the whole humanity.</text></comment>