Comment by tracker1

Comment by tracker1 6 hours ago

I'm still a heavy advocate for requiring second/dual-sourcing in govt contracts... literally for anything that can be considered essential infrastructure or communications technology and medicine. A role of govt in a capitalist society is to ensure competition and domestic availability/production as much as possible.

While my PoV is US centered, I feel that other nations should largely optimize for the same as much as possible. Many of today's issues stem from too much centralization of commercial/corporatist power as opposed to fostering competition. This shouldn't be in the absence of a baseline of reasonable regulation, just optimizing towards what is best for the most people.

gosub100 6 hours ago

Suppose we got nuked or some calamity caused the interruption of all the fancy x-nanoneter processes. What would we actually miss out on? I don't know what the latest process nodes we have stateside are, but let's say we could produce 2005 era cpus here. What would we actually miss out on? I don't think it would affect anything important. You could do everything we do today, just slower. I think the real advancement is in software, programming languages, and libraries.

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icedchai 2 hours ago

Software is much, much more bloated today than it was in 2005. 64-bit CPUs were available, but not quite mainstream yet. A "high end" consumer system had a couple gigabytes of RAM and chipset limitations generally capped you out at 4 or 8 gigs. You were lucky to have two CPU cores.
If you took today's software and tried running it on a memory constrained, slow, 2005 era system, you'd be in for some pain.

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- MarsIronPI 2 hours ago
  
  I used to daily-drive a Thinkpad X200 from 2008. As soon as you touch the modern (i.e. bloated) web, you feel the slowness. Other than that and gaming, it ran fine.
  
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tracker1 5 hours ago

I'm talking about way more than just CPUs... And for your question, we'd pretty much miss out on modern-like mobile phones entirely. 90nm -> 18A/1.8nm is a LOT of reduction in size and energy... not to count the evolution in battery and display technology over the same period.
Now apply that to weapons systems in conflict against an enemy that DOES have modern production that you (no longer) have... it's a recipe for disaster/enslavement/death.
China, though largely hamstrung, is already well ahead of your hypothetical 2005 tech breakpoint.
Beyond all this, it's not even a matter of just slower, it's a matter of even practical... You couldn't viably create a lot of websites that actually exist on 2005 era technology. The performance memory overhead just weren't there yet. Not that a lot of things weren't possible... I remember Windows 2000 pretty fondly, and you could do a LOT if you had 4-8x what most people were buying in RAM.

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- fooker 5 hours ago
  
  China can make CPUs around as good as 2016-18 intel now.
  
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fweimer 2 hours ago

I think there have been many improvements since 2005 that are not dependent at all on the process node.

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numpad0 an hour ago

I have an unpopular pet theory: the exponentially growing software bloat actually exists to slow computers back down to bearable levels for common folks, and that's why the most bloated frameworks have consistently replaced obsolete, less bloated ones, throughout the last decade.
Why else are everything now seem to be wrappers for wrappers? What if the bloat was, subconsciously or whatever, the point?

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unethical_ban 5 hours ago

One superpower being in 2005 for CPUs and another being in 2030, and at cold/hot war, would be decisive.
If society as a whole reverted to 2005, we would be fine.

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