To be a Carpenter/Handyman or a Computer expert

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jacob
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Re: To be a Carpenter/Handyman or a Computer expert

Post by jacob »

@ffj - Some day... autovideo for the rest of us! 8-)

In the mean time, I would like to know what T-Pain sounds like after he accidentally planes himself.
Aooiiooiiuuooiiioh motherfuiiiuuuiickeaaiouooo!!?

bryan
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Re: To be a Carpenter/Handyman or a Computer expert

Post by bryan »

TheRedHare wrote: After reading the "Myths and the future" blog post, it got me thinking that all my hard work and studies in computer technology seems to just be a waste since we won't have any thing to power it...unless we find some type of solution (mass solar power?) It makes more sense that the handyman skills will be much more valuable in the future than computer work.
Oh my goodness! That was your takeaway from that blog post?!?! :shock: :o

As far as energy goes.. I think the only thing that might really change is cost of _dense_ energy aka energy storage. Main effect would be more expensive or slower transport of goods/people. The earth and sun offer plenty of "affordable" energy to be reasonably harnessed to do everything we do today for a long time (may need more energy to do some crazy stuff..). Computers are pretty damn important and "don't use that much energy" (and are improving in compute/energy metric constantly).

Hell, just Bitcoin is using as much energy as the entire country of Uruguay: http://digiconomist.net/beci and most people just shrug it off..

Of course humans tend to find ways to use up cheap energy.

jacob
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Re: To be a Carpenter/Handyman or a Computer expert

Post by jacob »

In terms of cost, I don't think Joule/MHz is the right metric. Is the cost of making a GHz chip really 1000x cheaper than making a MHz chip ... if not ... maybe we should look at what the floor is in terms of maintaining a semi-conductor factory: So what's the cost in terms of Joule/Chip? And how has that changed over time? Moore's law too? Or does it work more along the lines of simple manufacturing scale capacity?

In any case ... in the short run it comes down to how US consumers (being at the margin of waste) value services. We already know that driving SUVs for short runs to get the puppy's nail trimed seems to be the most wasteful of all behaviors on planet Earth---somewhat exemplifying the epitome of human civilization. This is why the type/weight/MPG of average car sold in the US correlates with were the pump price is ... but what is beyond that. In comparably ROE expenditures other marginal efforts seem to be in providing cheap food in large ME populations. That sounds horrible and it is ... but increase the oil price and that's the other pain point in the geopolitical/geoeconomic system.

bryan
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Re: To be a Carpenter/Handyman or a Computer expert

Post by bryan »

jacob wrote:In terms of cost, I don't think Joule/MHz is the right metric. Is the cost of making a GHz chip really 1000x cheaper than making a MHz chip ... if not ... maybe we should look at what the floor is in terms of maintaining a semi-conductor factory: So what's the cost in terms of Joule/Chip? And how has that changed over time? Moore's law too? Or does it work more along the lines of simple manufacturing scale capacity?
$/kWh and $/workload going down over time as well. Not sure if it's been plainly sussed out how much this is from technology improvements versus scaling..

For joule/workload, that should be due more to the tech:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koomey's_law:
> The number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling approximately every 1.57 years.... The implications of Koomey’s law are that the amount of battery needed for a fixed computing load will fall by a factor of 100 every decade.

Doesn't have to be joule/MHz or joule/FLOPs. Joule/workload (aka static benchmark) is more apt.

The cost of factories is of course bundled up into the price of chips afaict, though there is a lifetime for a given chip SKU at all different prices... and that chip IP may move to a new factory after a die shrink or iterative design improvement etc. Sometimes difficult to get static benchmarks that work across so many generations..

jacob
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Re: To be a Carpenter/Handyman or a Computer expert

Post by jacob »

@bryan - I'm looking for the production cost in joules per unit. Not cycles/running cost which I would expect to be exponential similar to Moore's law since that relationship also has to do with minimization. I don't think joule/cycles is more relevant ... a present word-editor isn't more effective just because it requires a much bigger computer than e.g. a 1989 Wordperfect editor. The internet today does not have more relevant information on it than it did in 2008 ... might have more animations and higher res vids ... but in terms of info .. hmmm ...

Point being ... if I'd had to make a naive guess, I'd expect the cost of a CPU to remain almost constant or linear ... and if it was cost of computational/productivity/chip (if that can be measured), I'd expect it to be constant. As they say ... one sees the effect of the computer revolution in every single stat except for productivity.

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Re: To be a Carpenter/Handyman or a Computer expert

Post by bryan »

So a manufacturing cost in terms of joules per processor? Curious ask.. I'm not really sure I guess.. Certainly a big factor is the huge amount of processors made in the last year compared to any previous year, which is thanks to a combination of economic scaling and technology improvements. If you ignore the newfangled chip designs, you can buy a chip today for $1 that roughly does what a chip in 1993 did for (1993 $) $600. The costs of manufacturing (energy included) are supposedly baked into the price of a processor unit...

If you want more specific, direct details you may need to look up intel's financials and do some math estimations? Could be an interesting exercise and produce some interestingly correlated graphs upon which you might be able to predict some things. Maybe a good subject for an MBA student that wants to work at a HW tech company?

Has anyone proposed a conversion of all costs on balance sheets (R&D) to energy costs? e.g. R&D is made up of humans that are ~.1kWh each...

note: Koomey's_law from above was found first in DSP space. This makes a lot of sense considering those are far more ASIC-like: the benchmark workload for a DSP, DFT, has been pretty constant and used in practice since the beginning. Whereas CPUs have general purpose workloads.

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