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Comment by Etheryte

2 days ago

That's such an odd way to use units. Why would you do 10^56 * 10^-9 seconds?

This was my thought. Nanoseconds are an eternity. You want to be using Planck units for your worst-case analysis.

  • Planck units are a mathematical convenience, not a physical limit. For instance, the Planck mass is on the order of an eyelash or grain of sand.

    • Planck units are physical limits. The Planck mass is the limit of the mass of an elementary particle before it would form a black hole.

      3 replies →

  • If you go far beyond nanoseconds, energy becomes a limiting factor. You can only achieve ultra-fast processing if you dedicate vast amounts of matter to heat dissipation and energy generation. Think on a galactic scale: you cannot have even have molecular reaction speeds occurring at femtosecond or attosecond speeds constantly and everywhere without overheating everything.

Nanoseconds is a natural unit for processors operating around a GHz, as it's roughly the time of a clock cycle.

If a CPU takes 4 cycles to generate a UUID and the CPU runs at 4 GHz it churns out one every nanosecond.