Slashing the Energy Consumption of the Next Generation Supercomputers
Absolutely fascinating BBC News article about the ultra-energy-efficient, ultra-tiny future of supercomputers (Thanks, Twitter friend @whatgreeninvest).
I found some bits especially startling: According to the IBM researcher leading the team,
“The cost of a transistor works out to 1/100th of the price of printing a single letter on a page.”
“In the future, computers will be dominated by energy costs – to run a data centre will cost more than to build it.”
“It takes about 1,000 times more energy to move a data byte around than it does to do a computation with it once it arrives.”
Even the early protoype of the team’s water-cooled computer is half again as fast as today’s fastest supercomputers—but it’s larger than a refrigerator. Scientists want to shrink it to the size of a sugar cube!
Amazing how far technology has come–and what’s in the near future.
For sure. I remember life without computers (other than megamonster mainframes that filled a room; you talked tot hem with punch cards), cell or even cordless phones, laser printers, CD players (never mind MP3)…