On Monday, July 25, 2016 at 9:15:40 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 17:36:13 -0700 (PDT), Uncle Monster
wrote:

On Monday, July 25, 2016 at 3:38:27 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 15:26:44 -0400, burfordTjustice
wrote:

Computers will use more electricity than the entire world can generate
by 2040, tech experts claim

Nightmare scenario means humanity will be simply unable to power the
systems which keep us alive

But the current digital big bang could end with a disappointing whimper because humanity may be unable to produce enough power to keep computers running, experts have warned.

A leading technical organised called the Semiconductor Industry Association has produced a study which said that computer-crazy society will be running short of electricity by 2040

It wrote: €œComputing will not be sustainable by 2040, when the energy required for computing will exceed the estimated worlds energy production.€�

The Semiconductor Industry Association meets every year to discuss how electronic components called transistors €“ which power computer circuits €“ can be made ever smaller.

Now the organisation is conceding that they probably wont get any tinier, heralding the end of an era where computers got faster and faster as transistors shrunk to every tinier sizes.

This means tech firms will have to think of new ways to make computers powerful enough to keep up with demands.

€œDriverless cars and personalised medicine along with countless other applications of intelligent systems are on the horizon, the Semiconductor Industry Association added.

The year 2040 carries a huge resonance in the tech world, because some people believe thats when artificial intelligence will become as clever as us humans €“ a moment known as the singularity.

This is unlikely to happen if we keep suffering power cuts because our computers are taking up too much energy.

Whats the best way to make sure a malign computer doesnt wipe us all out?
Make sure its not plugged in.


I call bull**** on this. You just have to look what happened in the
last 25 years. Computing power skyrocketed and the electrical power
used plummeted.
Your smart phone that can take a whole day's worth of charge from a 5v
1 amp USB port in less than an hour, has the power of a mainframe that
had a 208v 100a plug on it.

I used to build DC power supplies that used shunt regulators. Now we have switching power supplies that waste a lot less power. ^_^

[8~{} Uncle Shunt Monster

Those 100 amp mainframes used switchers. Huge ones obviously. IBM
stopped using shunt regulators, and pass regulators by the mid 60s. We
did have at least one machine (3705 communication controller) that
used a strange SCR supply that took the 208vac and made the DC
voltages directly by using PWM and a buttload of big capacitors.
They were scary noisy on the power line side tho.

The computers I played with when I was young were the Univac 1100 series and the IBM 360/50 RAX systems back in 1965-1966 at the university. The university was replacing the Univac with the IBM during that time and I had a lot of fun learning about computers and programming. I remember having boxes of punch cards as a way of carrying around a program I had written. My country sent astronauts to the Moon and back with computers like that. I've never lost my love of science, technology and learning new things. ^_^

[8~{} Uncle Tech Monster