Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Starting in the 90s up until today, the CPU surged ahead of everything else: disk, memory, and network. Today we have very, very fast chips that are bound by the speed of their connection to their memory, disk, and each other (the Internet).

Memory has improved with DDR technology. (What are we up to now... DDR4?) Disk is improving with SSDs, which offer a huge speed improvement. If you've never used a box with a SSD in it, it must be seen to be believed.

But the real bottleneck I think is the Internet. Imagine what we could do with gigabit peer-to-peer IPv6 networks in areas like games, collaborative development tools, teleconferencing, etc. Things like virtual reality "metaverses" could really arrive, etc. These in turn would require more CPU power and parallelism. Super-fast gigabit+ WANs would deliver the killer apps that we need to keep pushing the speed barrier.

Once again, it is the Internet carriers that are the barrier to all progress. Breaking the telco oligopolies is the thing that must happen to unlock the future. Everything-- maybe even the continuation of Moore's Law-- depends on that. The telcos, cable companies, and wireless carriers are the trolls guarding the bridge to the future.

Having a speedy home connection is well and good, but what really needs to improve is mobile data. Think of stuff like Google Glass, and all the possible advantages of having a constant connection everywhere you go for a two-way exchange of data.

Now imagine your data bill after just a couple hours of live streaming HD video. Something's gotta change. The bandwidth keeps increasing as technology improves, but the price per bit is actually getting higher.

Mobile data is the worst, by far, but if we're talking about pushing the performance envelope then we're talking about PCs. Mobile is constrained by power consumption as well as network bandwidth, so you're not going to see blazing fast continuations of Moore's law there.

I really think Google Fiber nationwide would lead to killer apps that would revitalize the PC and the high-end chip market. I'm thinking of rich constant collaboration, virtual reality, next generations of MMORPGs where you can really richly interact with the world's physics (e.g. shaping materials, in-world chemistry, etc.), tele-presence, digital telepathy with brain-computer interfaces, distributed supercomputing, ... lots of stuff. All those things are things that are CPU-hungry. Many are embarrassingly parallel, so they can utilize many-core chips efficiently.

If Intel, AMD, Dell, Apple's PC/laptop division, IBM, etc. knew what was good for them they'd get together and invest in gigabit+ broadband nationwide. It's also got to be network-neutral, since all the things I mentioned above are at least somewhat P2P. The PC industry is spiraling down because of a lack of killer apps for high-end boxes. Most of these are waiting on fast networks.

The internet has become a necessity in a lot of peoples lives and with such a high barrier to entry and only a few telcos controlling peoples access there is too much room for abuse of power by the telcos. We need to recognize that access to the internet is turning from a tech issue to a social issue and start policing it as such.

I don't think mbit/sec are necessary. Today's telepresence for example can be done at less than 15mbit/sec , maybe even 6 mbit/sec.

And if we look at local desktop just as a dumb terminal and using the cloud as the PC , offering compressed display doesn't take that much bandwidth.

And i hadn't seen any really interesting apps in 50/100 mbps networks available around the world.

I think those 50/100/etc. markets are too small to inspire the kind of innovation I'm talking about.

One example that keeps coming to mind is "real" virtual reality (including next-generation MMORPGs and tele-presence stuff). Consider the bandwidth requirements of a world whose physics are malleable: in-world chemistry, in-world shaping of novel materials, in-world machines that actually work in-world or that function by means of realtime-modifiable embedded scripting, etc. All that state would have to be synchronized across millions of clients in near-realtime, requiring things like vastly distributed P2P "rumor mill" replication protocols.

You can do that with Google Fiber grade Internet access. You can't do that with what we have now.

What prevents a game developer to offer such services , computed in the cloud and streamed to home displays ? the streaming speed wouldn't need to be that great, and the latency manageable, like onlive have shown us.

And the economics will be quite nice for the game developer since they pay per use for onlive servers. Said economics would also be nice (at least in the beginning) , for users who wouldn't need to purchase an expensive machine.

It depends on how much you are streaming. I can stream 1080p fine on my 20Mb connection but 2 1080p streams and the internet is basically unusable for anything else.

If you have a street full of families with everyone all streaming 1080p near constantly you are going to need to greater capacity.

And that's only at 1080p, what about high resolution 4K displays etc? What about when as well as keyboard and mouse input you want to send output for high precision accelerometers , biometric data etc etc.

That could be done. But what I wrote about above wasn't the only idea I can think of that could use heavy bandwidth, and the quality and richness would be better with local rendering anyway.

What I'm ultimately talking about is a "640k is enough for anyone" mind-lock mentality around bandwidth. There are all kinds of possibilities when you have hundreds of megabits or more to work with.

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