Dark Silicon Followup

-
Something I saw this last week that prompted me to think about dark silicon again was a project Ubuntu is working on, where you have a phone that is mostly a normal Android phone, but when you plug it into a computer screen and keyboard it can act as a full desktop operating system.  Since a modern smartphone is much more powerful than the desktops of ages past, and since we tend to do more and more things on far away servers, this seems like it might be a model for the future of computing.  You computer fits in your pocket and you use it as a phone most of the time, but then you plug it into some sort of dock and it becomes your desktop.

But it strikes me that in a future like that you're likely to have a bunch of computational resources sitting there in your phone that only light up when the phone has access to a hefty power source.  Heat dissipation out of the phone will still be a hard limitation since there's no way you can fit a fan in a phone form factor, but there's still room for quite a bump.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: Power, Sex, Suicide

-
Image
  Introducing the Mitochondria “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” - Variously attributed Everybody learns something about Mitochondria in grade school.  That they are an organelle inside your cells.  That they let your body break down sugar and create ATP using oxygen in a way that’s far more efficient than fermentation without oxygen.  That’s clearly an important role, when we’re drowning, say, and can’t get the oxygen needed for aerobic respiration we die.  However, they’re a lot more than that too.  Mitochondria used to have independent bacterial lives charting their own fates.  That their existence came to be so enmeshed with their hosts is arguably the most unlikely but important event in the history of life on Earth and has some implications. Pump and Dump Aerobic Respiration Essentially all life lives by extracting energy from a difference in the concentration of hydrogen across a lipid membrane.  Let’s say you’re a mitochondria or a bacteria that lives off of
Read more

Sometimes you need a new word

-
Lets say I'm telling a story about some hiker heading up into the mountains.  I mention that when passing under a cliff a pebble came loose and landed on him.  That might sting but it wouldn't occur to you to ask if he died.  Lets say that instead I mention that a boulder had landed on him.  Then you'd expect him to be quite dead. That's the nice thing about these old English words that've been around a while and encode distinctions that make sense in our everyday lives.  The difference between the pebble and the boulder is just a matter of degree but it's one where the quantitative difference is big enough to become qualitative.  If we just had one word whoever I was telling the story to would have to ask questions and because we run into rocks so often I'd know when I'd have to use an adjective. When you're talking about scientific things, though, you don't often have this choice of words.  Energy is energy and you're expected to use a
Read more

Seveneves and the Roche limit

-
For an author it's important to get things that the reader might find hard to swallow out there and dealt with as soon as possible.  I didn't really enjoy Neal Stephenson's last book, REAMDE , past the halfway point because too many improbably occurrences had piled up and my suspension of disbelief didn't recover.  By contrast his newest novel, Seveneves , seems to be doing an excellent job of getting the improbable stuff dealt with quickly and I've been enjoying the book without any hangups.  I've only gotten through chapter 7, acknowledged, but I've got a feeling I'll continue to enjoy this one. But of course the second improbable of the two things gives me a chance to talk about some physics I find interesting so I'm going to dissect what I think Stephenson gets wrong.  Not because I think the author is a bad person or wrote a bad book but just because I think the physics is nifty and reading this prompted me to share it. The basic setup of th
Read more