News Linus Torvalds says RISC-V will make the same mistakes as Arm and x86

[Justin Goldberg]

The difference is noticeable only with very CPU optimized code. But nowadays who needs it ?
99% of softwares development is done with high level languages and frameworks with many abstractions layers.
Optimization is needed only partially by kernel and drivers developers.

This thinking is part of the reason we need buy new PCs every few years.

Example, Haiku OS runs well on an old server that was made in 2004. But haiku is responsive because of it's excellent base design, as well as low level computer knowledge.

 

[bit_user]

Example, Haiku OS runs well on an old server that was made in 2004. But haiku is responsive because of it's excellent base design, as well as low level computer knowledge.

It's easier when you start with a clean slate and fewer requirements. I suspect that if Haiku had to satisfy all of the requirements placed on something like Windows 11, it would start to resemble it more closely, in terms of performance.

 

[Nyara]

Producing & sustaining so many humans is (so far) even more resource-intensive than AI!
; )

Eh? Humans themselves are running in a fraction of the energy requirements, most humans barely spend 1KW/hr per year of energy, which is a lot more than the 50000KW/hr a small scale training server needs.

What does humans spends a lot of energy into is in the material things they want, like AI hardware, since energy resources value in our current economic system is only equal to the cost of extraction + profit margin of the extractor, plus one time costs at power plants creations and engines.

The way raw materials and natural resources are valued in our economic system was intentionally created that way to favour those in the power some centuries ago, and, in a theorical planet with infinite resources, it would make a lot of sense. But that is the biggest delusion by itself.

The main advantage of AI is that it can be owned, like slaves were owned before, and you can train it while being ensalved, unlike slaves before which had stunted learning capacities while being enslaved. To our mercantilist economic system, this is the dream, until we kill the planet in some decades more, but that is not contemplated by the current system.

 

[bit_user]

Eh? Humans themselves are running in a fraction of the energy requirements,

You've heard the term "carbon footprint", no? We should consider the entire energy consumption of a human worker. If you want to compare lifecycle costs, then you have to account for the energy & resource consumption including all of the nonproductive years of a human.

Taking all of this into account, wet brains look remarkably inefficient!

 

[Nyara]

You've heard the term "carbon footprint", no? We should consider the entire energy consumption of a human worker. If you want to compare lifecycle costs, then you have to account for the energy & resource consumption including all of the nonproductive years of a human.

Taking all of this into account, wet brains look remarkably inefficient!

A 2000 calories diet equals to 2.2w/hr per day, or 803w/hr per year, or 64kw/hr in a 80 years life time. This is the energy cost (25% variance) of keeping a human alive and thinking.

Our industrial economy exponentially scales this number, to an extent, out of need, as we need to artificially grow food through industrial agriculture, and keep people warm or refreshed in overexpanded habitats, and the costs of healthcare, and the educational and transport costs to keep all the previous going.

However, from the 5000-10000kw/hr per person to keep a modern lifestyle going to the for example 78000kw/hr somebody in the United States uses, which includes now making AI handle more things that we were already handling before, there is a huge difference.

Technology needs to improve further before it is prudent to use AI in tasks that humans were already doing, and most efforts should be focused in things our non-binary brains cannot handle well, instead. The only reason it makes sense to use AI as people replacement is due to our very broken economic system.

And in a similar way, is due the same that high-level and api redundancy is taking over optimization, too.

 

[bit_user]

A 2000 calories diet equals to 2.2w/hr per day, or 803w/hr per year, or 64kw/hr in a 80 years life time. This is the energy cost (25% variance) of keeping a human alive and thinking.

No, it's not. Creating food with the requisite nutrition and energy + getting it to the worker + preparing it and accounting for spoilage and other waste puts the figure vastly higher. But, even after that, food is just a small part of an educated worker's total energy footprint.

from the 5000-10000kw/hr per person to keep a modern lifestyle going to the for example 78000kw/hr somebody in the United States uses,

I doubt you're comparing the energy needed for education, care, and feeding of a knowledge worker to the US figure. A university education (or equivalent) surely uses a lot of energy. Those unproductive years should also be accounted for, in the total human lifecycle cost.

The whole thing is a big tangent, though.

 

[TJ Hooker]

A 2000 calories diet equals to 2.2w/hr per day, or 803w/hr per year, or 64kw/hr in a 80 years life time.

Rather than "W/hr" (or kW/hr), the unit you're looking for is Whr (potentially written as W⋅hr). It's watt-hour, not watt-per-hour.

Also, your numbers here are off by a factor of a thousand, likely due to the fact that "calorie" can refer to two different units which differ by a factor of 1000. In the physics/thermodynamic use, calorie is equal to 4.184 joules. When used in the context of food energy, one calorie is equal to 4184 J (4.184 kJ). Food calories are sometimes referred to as kilocalories (or written with a capital 'C') to differentiate. So humans consume roughly 2.2 kWhrs, per day, in food.