today, for those in the know, is when apple will announce its annual offerings of ultra-hipness. this time, rumours of a flash memory ipod or a really cheap imac... probably no g5 powerbook, because the betas are melting the casings off. the problem in that instance isn't developing a faster computer, it is developing one where the heat from the processor doesn't overpower the design of the unit. things are evolving.
that got me thinking about the problem of moore's law. the ceiling effect. the fact that we came from (when i was in college) 60, 75, 180mhz, 500mhz in the 90's to 1,2 and 3gz is pretty fabulous. i remember my best friend actually brought his huge mac system to my apartment in college to hang out for a few days and mess around in photoshop and music apps. a good bit of that time was spent waiting for photoshop to hurry the fuck up. now that's not really the case. photoshop rarely makes me wait, except maybe when i'm opening a huge file. no big deal. now of course apple ghz are rated differently than intel... but whatever...
the point is, the stellar increases in speed, both clock and memory bandwidth, are sorta... slowing down. the problem isn't us. entirely. it's god. see, when god set out to create the universe, he like all of us, was working against a deadline. 7 days. he had a lot of ground to cover. so he cut corners, albeit ones that he never would have made if he thought anyone would notice. i'm talking 'bout the speed of light. the fastest thing in this or any other realm.
anyone would, or in this case, god, would think that 186,282.4 miles per second is fast enough. now sure, he/she/it/them could have made the speed of light slightly faster than the speed of sound... or in contrast could have made it travel 57.28 billion miles per second. whatever. i mean shit dude. god had to decide on something. 186,282.4 seemed reasonable. so....
what does that have to do with shiny new computers? the chips in computers are designed to ferry light in aiding the (now) multiple billions of instructions per second. so what happens when the processors begin to approach the "moore's law" problem for being to fast for their own good? do you get a team together to develop faster light? nope. you're screwed. all because god had to skimp on ionic/electronic velocity. slacker.
but that's ok. because he got the gulf coast just right. and strawberries rule. so you work with what you've got. the industry is now formalizing a new paradigm of multi-processing. it's already out there, all over the place. but it's going to get exponentially bigger.
so here's an idea. home farms, or comfarms. just like pixar uses hundreds of processors (called farms) to to aid in the development of their animated films, consumers could or might use multiple multi-processors to do what ever it is that we will have to do in the near future.
these farms don't really need to be that big, they just need to be very well ventilated. let's say one of these farms were installed in an apt. complex. each apt. would pay a fee to use the farm, and connect to it using whatever hardware they wanted. the farm would be able to do much more than a single computer, even one with 3 or 4 processors. i'm talking several hundred or thousand in an array.
that's a lot of processing power. thousands of billions of instructions per second. maybe enough to think up a way to make light faster? there are different names for these arrays. multicore, concurrency processing... etc. one thing they would do well, would be to distribute processing and memory depending on the applications used. different arrays within the main array would focus on specific applications or tasks.
...you know all the cheezy sci-fi movies where this evil (female) master computer sublimates mankind in order to have proper control, etc? usually names like the sphinx, or clara or whatever that one was called in that rush concept album... well that's not what i'm talking about.
maybe eventually we'll have a skynet. or priests of the temples of syrinx... but for now, or the soon to be now, well cooled community-dsp farms are more likely. they could not only serve in a client/user setting, they could also house the cpu functions of modern buildings. cooling, detection, entertainment/on demand programming, security... and even monitoring.
sure, its big brotherish, but shit, look who we elected. we're fucked already, we might as well have everything automated.
i just did a search online and this article pretty much explains the multi-processing concepts best...
concurrency article