In the news:
We maxed out, I keep telling people. We have enough computers already. We have enough processing power. How do I know this? I know most desktops CPUs and GPUs idle most of the time. Which is why companies don’t buy brand new computers as much anymore, which is why we’re seeing those headlines.
(Let’s not forget that around 200-300M computers/year have been sold since 2000. It had to slow down.)
From early 2010s and on, processing power has been bigger than our needs. It is a fact that all nerds out there don’t want to spread, but it is so true. Check this out with Nvidia:
They released their latest GPU a couple months ago. 76.3B transistors in 6cm², if you know numbers, you know this is an utterly insane achievement. It moves a fucking TB per second in memory bandwidth, it’s plain gross.
Well, what is the usage for this behemoth of the latest hi-tech possible? There’s none, really. You can do amazing architecture with way less expensive GPUs. Games run just fine with older cards. Even more telling: this RTX card is so fast and so bored, it has the time to create frames between frames. LMAO. What a waste of time and energy: 450W to wait for a CPU to feed it.
There’s a massive disconnect between our real human needs and tech. We maxed out. Another example:
A show with good visual quality, good sound subtitles etc, is about 3GB. It will be playable and look fine from your phone to a projector. It is still 3GB. It will always will be 3GB.
You download it over 4G. It takes about a hour. Is a hour long? No. A day is at least many hours. You transfer it to a device, it takes 5mn. Is 5mn long? No. It’s a human timeframe that we use all the time to do little things. So while the movie transfers, you go do a bit of dishes or cuddle with your boo.
My point is have 16K movies on 6G instantly viewable has the most diminishing returns ever: no one will ever care about waiting a little bit, as this is how it is. Sometimes in life, we wait. It is fine.
Therefore the ultimate goal of tech to do it faster, has been reached. I’m going around my laptops with TB drives, giggling at how much fucking space that is. 99% of the world uses computers with files in the order of KB or MB.
So yeah we won’t ever need 128-core at 18GHz CPUs, I’m afraid.
The opportunity here is to use the computers we have much better.
Remember: climate change means consuming less and smarter.