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What would life be like if computers were each "light" and powerless?

  • This question needs to be interpreted more broadly - Imagine we were limited - ie., we couldn't pack gigabytes of memory or couldn't get computers to be so fast for some reason? Would that limitation have given rise to a completely different paradigm today? Say, to solve most practical computing problems of today, we'd have to own a distributed 'swarm' of computers instead of larger, more powerful single-unit computers of today? Could that have given rise to cheaper computers that probably are priced only as much as a light bulb instead of paying for very powerful computers whose full potential most of us don't utilize? If yes, could that have given rise to a more equal society, since many poor people can afford to own atleast one such primitive, limited computer and still manage to learn and do a whole lot of things using it? If we only had such less powerful computers, how would the Internet look like?

  • Answer:

    You've just described reality. Super computers are made up of clusters of commodity processors rather than single massive chips. It's just that they haven't gotten down to lightbulb price yet though this is on the horizon with research going in to using massive ARM clusters for HPCs.

Mark Robinson at Quora Visit the source

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We have much more demanding compute requirements now. We just find ways to work around limitations. Example if Moore's law stops being true then we work around it with distributed computing or we find ways to extend it's life.

William Emmanuel Yu

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