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Nornagest comments on Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why can't we just make a CPU as large as a dump truck, that can store a thousand petabytes, then run an AI and try to evolve intelligence? I can't imagine that this is beyond the technology of 2015.
(Not that this would be a good idea, I'm just saying that it seems possible.)
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.