Tech they ought to have.

Maldorian wrote:Is there any explaination why they use Plasma rifles in Honorverse, but not as Shipweapons?

I wonder, why no one has defense satellites. I you remember: As they thinking about the "Star Wars System" in the Reagan era there were armed satellites part of the System, so armed satellites are a very old idea. The Manticorians were the firt who has Multi engine missles at their ships, because they are very good in micro tecnology. But for System defense size doesn´t matter. even the solarians or others should be able to create a kind of missle withe more engines, in a bigger size. Defense satellites means also, that the structure is strong enough armored that Lasercluster couldn´t destroy it, and more important, a defense satellite should have defense weapons, not only to defend themself, to defend the planet were they in Orbit against incomming missles. What use have all your defense missles, if your planet will be still destroyed?

Another item you missed is the independant weapons platforms used at Hades. Essentially a satellite with a graser and a fusion plant. I believe these were also employed at the Manticorian junction along with the lader pumped mines.

We must remember that Science Fiction authors have always had the problem of making the tech in their books futuristic to readers with out crossing over the line in it making it magic.

Tech to kill bacteria and organisms on and in food. No more food poisoning in restaurants or homes. Nullifying the need to flash freeze sushi.

Bread boxes at home that extend the shelf life of bread.

Sight into your refrigerator without having to open it and stand in from of it staring endlessly as if something's going to jump out at you and suggest itself for eating or cooking. Automatic inventories of what has been placed in the refrigerator or removed. No need to guess who drank your last Mountain Dew or Old Tilman.

EpiPen-like convenient applications of Quick Heal for minor cuts, abrasions, abruisings, over zealous hickies and bird-like mosquitoes.

.

I'd like to know what the watch tech is like on the Honorverse. How many ATMs of water resistance. Do they contain radiation exposure dials? Insane warnings? Indicators dealing with space and space travel - an Honorverse Nautical Watch!

Incidentally, who are the Swiss of Time Pieces in the Honorverse?

Tenshinai wrote:

kzt wrote:Putting huge amounts of work into a technology to get very minor improvements is the definition of a mature technology. It's the long tail on the graph. You can eventually get significant improvements, but it will take a long time and cost a whole lot of time, money and effort of experts.

It´s not because we know so amazingly much that they take such effort to improve further, but because to figure out more is just EXTREMELY complex.

You just used the definition of PLATEAUED as I just used it and kzt used it and then have the audacity to say, NO, it is not...

Two Thumbs up.

kzt wrote:When you need a 200 billion dollar, 10 square mile system to possibly allow further investigation, then yes, that is definitely a mature technology. Essentially you are in the "bigger rocket" stage, where you are using brute force to accomplish things.

Compare what was done with accelerators in the first 20 years and the cost per discovery and the average number of discoveries per 10 years to what is going on now.

How much effort or money it costs to go further has ZERO correlation with whether a science is mature or not. Where did you get that kind of notion from?

And again, developments have not plateaued, there´s still a steady stream of advances popping out of research, they´re just generally less practically important.

Tenshinai wrote:How much effort or money it costs to go further has ZERO correlation with whether a science is mature or not. Where did you get that kind of notion from?

And again, developments have not plateaued, there´s still a steady stream of advances popping out of research, they´re just generally less practically important.

First, we are talking technology, not science. You reach a certain point where you simply cannot extend the technology in any practical way and it's time to change to a completely new approach to get significant advances. Animal harnesses for freight wagons are a very well understood technology that was pretty thoroughly developed for over 2000 years - with a series of innovative breakthroughs during that time, but diesel engines get just a bit more R&D dollars these days for some reason.

Second, when a field of science produces only occasional new data and that is only vaguely interesting even to specialists that is either a sign that nobody considers it important or that it's pretty much completely understood.

Relax wrote:Computing plateaued a decade ago.

Single-threaded CPU performance arguably plateaued a decade ago (really, closer to 5 years ago; Sandy Bridge is noticeably faster clock per clock than Conroe). CPU efficiency has improved tremendously in the last decade (hence laptops with sub-15W CPUs offering 'good enough' performance these days, 20+-'big' core server CPUs that draw under 200W, and cell phones with CPUs that perform similarly to ten-year-old desktop CPUs). GPU performance has improved by huge margins (4K gaming is possible with current high-end cards) and doesn't seem likely to slow down any time soon (probably because it's mostly an insanely parallel problem). Flash-based mass storage becoming mass-market over the last few years was a huge deal, and if something similar happens with 3DXPoint or a related memory tech, it will be just as big.

drothgery wrote:GPU performance has improved by huge margins (4K gaming is possible with current high-end cards) and doesn't seem likely to slow down any time soon (probably because it's mostly an insanely parallel problem).

Compare the speed of improvement for GPUs in the late 90s/early 00s and today´s pace feels like a snail on glue.
No kidding. GPU performance doubled or more every one or two years.
If you compare over time, you will find that there is a fairly constant reduction in improvement over time.

drothgery wrote:Flash-based mass storage becoming mass-market over the last few years was a huge deal

Still waiting for that massive drop in pricetags that was promised LAST year though.


At least now they´re reliable and have decent longevity.

drothgery wrote:and if something similar happens with 3DXPoint or a related memory tech, it will be just as big.

We can hope, but 3DXP is still nowhere near the latencies needed to be used as RAM.

drothgery wrote:Single-threaded CPU performance arguably plateaued a decade ago (really, closer to 5 years ago; Sandy Bridge is noticeably faster clock per clock than Conroe).

That´s due to choice rather than technology however. Intel intentionally chose to go with the Nehalem architechture after Core2, knowing perfectly well that it was not optimal for desktop or singlethreaded performance.

Essentially, if Intel had taken the Core2 and applied only the optimal improvements that Nehalem got, the result would have been a CPU with probably 15-25% better singlethread performance.

Also, even despite that, every generation of Nehalem derivative have still had better singlethread performance than the previous one.

Really, you could easily get markedly improved singlethread performance as soon as Intel or AMD could design a new CPU maximized for it. IF you pay the pricetag it´s going to rack up.

For example, some models of the Broadwell is an excellent showcase, where them being fitted with huge L4 cache´s that were just twice as fast as the RAM, the effect on singlethreaded was still VERY nice.

Basically, you could take all the little optimisations, improved branch prediction, bigger and faster L1/L2/L3/L4, tracecache(and variations on it), more execution units(like Intel did with all Nehalem upgrades, but especially Skylake), more capable execution units(like AMDs superior FPU in the K7 and K8 series), more specialised execution units(Intel´s Nehalem derivate again)...

If you were willing to pay, you could probably get something with twice the singlethread performance from current tech.
But expect triple the pricetag, minimum.

drothgery wrote:CPU efficiency has improved tremendously in the last decade (hence laptops with sub-15W CPUs offering 'good enough' performance these days, 20+-'big' core server CPUs that draw under 200W

Sort of...

Thing is, a HUGE part of those improvements have nothing to do with cpu compute efficiency as such, but simply the development of power saving technologies, and to some degree even manufacturing and materials tech(SOI is a good example).

Another thing, well, those official numbers? Especially from Intel, they have very little to with reality. Because they define their TDP not as how much wattage a cpu can draw, but how much it "should" draw at most.

Point in case, the cpu i´m running, 4790K, had lots of people having trouble with the boost feature, guess why?

Because this officially 95W cpu, if it wants to max out, it needs to have the motherboard to not disallow drawing more power than 95W(this was a standard setting on several motherboard models), because if it maxes out it draws something more like 120-150W depending on individual cpu.

(this is also why you should NEVER EVER use the standard Intel cooler, because then you end up with the CPU clockthrottling up in the 90s C, while my CPU never goes above 75C, and rarely above 60C, thanks to a good cooler)

drothgery wrote:and cell phones with CPUs that perform similarly to ten-year-old desktop CPUs

Extremely unlikely to continue though, as we are just two or three dieshrinks away from where physical limitations come up.

And most semiconductor fabs are no longer getting upgraded to later shrinks, and the next wafer upscale, nope, probably never going to happen at all, both due to the costs no longer being offset enough by being able to produce faster.

We would need to have another fully populated Earth for the next wafer upscale to be profitable, preferably 2 or 3.

And it´s still very uncertain if they are even going to try to get the last 1(maybe even 2) dieshrinks into massproduction.

Tenshinai wrote:

drothgery wrote:Flash-based mass storage becoming mass-market over the last few years was a huge deal

Still waiting for that massive drop in pricetags that was promised LAST year though.


At least now they´re reliable and have decent longevity.

drothgery wrote:and if something similar happens with 3DXPoint or a related memory tech, it will be just as big.

We can hope, but 3DXP is still nowhere near the latencies needed to be used as RAM.

3D Xpoint memory is storage, not RAM. Unlike RAM and like flash memory, it retains data when powered off. Also like flash, you can only write to it so many times before it starts becoming unreliable.

3D Xpoint memory has read and write speeds that are much closer to RAM than flash. What's been holding it back is the controller hardware used with it--the current controllers are designed around flash speeds and latencies, but the controller technology is being improved to take advantage of 3D Xpoint memory. As in all things though, it's taking a while.

Discussion of Xpoint at the 50:28 mark of the PC Perspective Podcast #413 - 08/18/2016