You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Nornagest comments on Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: MrMind 16 March 2015 08:13AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (302)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Nornagest 17 March 2015 07:14:55PM *  7 points [-]

Why can't we just make a CPU as large as a dump truck [...?]

Lots of reasons, some of which Vaniver and ShardPhoenix have already given, but one of the big ones is that CPUs dissipate a truly enormous amount of heat for their size. Your average laptop I7 consumes about thirty watts, essentially all of which goes to heat one way or another, and it's about a centimeter square (the chip you see on the motherboard is bigger, but a lot of that is connections and housing). Let's call that about the size of a penny. That's an overestimate, but as we'll see, it won't matter much.

Now, a quick Google tells me that a dump truck can hold about 20 cubic meters (=20000 liters), and that a liter holds about 2000 closely packed pennies. So if we assume something with around the same packing and thermal efficiency, our dump truck-sized CPU will be putting out about 30 * 2000 * 20000 = 1.2 gigawatts of heat, or a bit more than the combined peak output of the two nuclear reactors powering a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

This poses certain design issues.