On 22 October 2017 at 09:32, Victor Stinner <[email protected]> wrote:
> Le 21 oct. 2017 20:31, "francismb" <[email protected]> a écrit : > > I understand that one can just multiply/divide the nanoseconds returned, > (or it could be a factory) but wouldn't it help for future enhancements > to reduce the number of functions (the 'pico' question)? > > > If you are me to predict the future, I predict that CPU frequency will be > stuck below 10 GHz for the next 10 years :-) > There are actually solid physical reasons for that prediction likely being true. Aside from the power consumption, heat dissipation, and EM radiation issues that arise with higher switching frequencies, you also start running into more problems with digital circuit metastability ([1], [2]): the more clock edges you have per second, the higher the chances of an asynchronous input changing state at a bad time. So yeah, for nanosecond resolution to not be good enough for programs running in Python, we're going to be talking about some genuinely fundamental changes in the nature of computing hardware, and it's currently unclear if or how established programming languages will make that jump (see [3] for a gentle introduction to the current state of practical quantum computing). At that point, picoseconds vs nanoseconds is likely to be the least of our conceptual modeling challenges :) Cheers, Nick. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability_in_electronics [2] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/14816/what-is-metastability [3] https://medium.com/@decodoku/how-to-program-a-quantum-computer-982a9329ed02 -- Nick Coghlan | [email protected] | Brisbane, Australia
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