Naas Energy

The Official WorldWideWeblog of Corey Naas


Nanoseconds and Nanometers: The Spotify Hit of the Week of your Computer's Working Class
2023-05-15

Imagine for a moment that you could slow down time, slowed such that a nanosecond felt like a second. And imagine if you could shrink yourself down, down to the size where the transistors on a processor are the size of a few meters, each taking the footprint of a parking spot. As you look around, it looks much like a factory, or like a digital post office of sorts. Now, play the song below. close your eyes. this is what you hear in the warehouse. indivdual electrons riding on copper, merging, diverting, slowing down, speeding up. transistors activating, saturating and cuting off. logic auditing logic. logic manipulating logic as electrons control electrons. data flowing, eight bits or a a byte at a time. you can almost read all the letters as they pass... if it's ascii, and you did your memorization exercise this morning. but if it's closed source it's all gibberish to any but the sender and receiver. information flows without mass, how does it exist? paths shifting. speeds adjusting. clocks ticking. the timing has to be exact, synchronous with the rotation of caesium atom states.

the industrial life of a few transistors, 14 in 114 billion.





This is what those hard workers listen to in the break room during their union-won-and-enforced break every 180 nanoseconds (992,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Strong! Oh, strike one, Steve transferred. Trying his hand at aluminum. God'b'w'ye Steve!)





This is what the *Root'N'Boot'N'Startup'Crew* listen to when they're tuning their craft performing all of the power on, self testing, external testing, booting and pre-run maintenance processes. That's why some computers make a sound when they boot up. it's only a few seconds for us, but it's decades for them.





This is what the RAM listens to while your computer is in hibernate mode. They're still on the clock cause they gotta be ready to take back their data on a dime, but for now all their data got saved to the magnetic guys so they're just sitting on couches reading, watching movies, and playing video games. at their speed, pong is the only one they can get slow enough to be remotely challenging. but they like watching the truman show on repeat because by the time they get to the big reveal it'd been so long that they'd forgotten what it was!





This is what the Cache guys listen on their way to work. Yeah, L1, L2, and L3. They may seem small, but that's because they are the elites of information algorithms, register poll predictions (aka "you read my mind!" from the computation interpreters), and timing. They are faaaast. And accurate. the time between their errors are measured in *days*. They get paid quadruple overtime on their already elite nanosecond rate because some loophole bypassed safety requirements that way. So these guys work hard and play hard.