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Comment by debo_

5 days ago

The oft-snickered-at "smuggling 3mb of hot RAM" line from Neuromancer may have been prophetic after all.

If you are a scifi author, it's a mistake to give any hard numbers in real-world units. You will, most likely, greatly underestimate. Even trying to greatly overestimate, you will underestimate.

Commander Data's specifications in the Star Trek TNG episode The Measure of a Man from 1989: 800 quadrillion bits of storage, computing at 60 trillion operations per second.

100 petabytes. That's a big machine. A very big machine. But supercomputers now have memories measured in petabytes.

They never used "bits" again in any Star Trek script. It was kiloquads and gigaquads from then on.

  • That's fun! To further prove your point I saw this and thought "yeah maybe 100 PB is more common these days but 60 trillion ops / second seems like a lot"

    Then I did some googling and it turns out that a single 5090 GPU has a peak FP32 performance of over 100 TFLOPS!

  • Pretty sure Commander Data's software wasn't written in Electron so the hardware was enough :)