Bernd
05/30/2020 (Sat) 20:57:53
No.37075
del
Let's take a look at some tidbits from issue #3.
The illustrations are Verne heavy, despite there's no Verne among the texts. They included a note at the end, these pictures are the original woodcuts (well, the prints) from the books of the French author.
Featured serious topic (I mean not fiction) is about computers and their future. I think all of us has some level of interest in this. So here's some noteworthy points and info they share.
The human brain needs about 25 watt of power to work, the ENIAC needed 150, however "the brain doesn't speak the language of mathematics" (as John Neumann said).
At that time they used 3rd gen computers (over 100 000 pieces all over the world!) and the 4th were on their way.
The author talks about miniaturization, how the following generations of computers got smaller and smaller in about 1:10 ratio. He speculates, that the computers of the future will be even smaller, and the size of building blocks will arrive to the size of neurons.
The size will lower and the necessary power will too. But the tasks we want to use computers for need faster and faster machines - they were capable of doing hundreds of thousands of operations per second, some in labs 1-2 millions and engineers planned machines capable of doing billions - which demands higher power consumption. This will also need more effective cooling, maybe even water cooling, what they thought to be buried with 1st gen computers.