Re: Government/society in post-scarcity interstellar environments

Wayne Throop skreiv:
Huh? DRAM still has one transistor per bit, right?

Normally, yes. Sligthly more if it's for example ECC-ram. And for
associated machinery, probably work out to 1.2 transistors/bit or
similarish.

I'd imagine the usual in a new entry-level system is a quarter gigabyte
nowdays, though older equipment might be half that.

On what planet ?

The cheapest Dell-laptop you can buy has 2GB of RAM, and costs $499,
$449 after a $50 mail-in rebate. (okay, so you -find- 1GB systems if you
try really hard...)

*minimum*; average may be as many as four billion in a typical single
system.

Much more. The Dell mentioned has 16 billion ram-bits, so probably on
the order of 20 billion transistors just for that. Then there's the
various other components, they tend to be much lower count, but it adds up.

My guess would be that the $449 entry-level laptop has -25- billion
transistors, not -4- billion.

But I wonder what the normal-household average is. The standard corporate
laptop that gets handed out these days has a eight billion transistors
a pop.

Much more. The average *used* one may have that little, afterall a
computer 2-4 years old won't have 2GB of RAM if it's entry-level, and
tons of those are still in use. But the standard that gets handed out
these days probably has on the order of 25 billion transistors.

Powerful desktop-machines, like the ones used by typical
software-developers are pushing 100 billion transistors each, and the
main thing holding them back is that Windows is so finicky with 64-bit
that many opt to stick with 2^32 = 4GB of ram.

You *KNOW* it's time for 32 bit computing to die when the $449 laptop
comes with 2^31 bytes of memory....

But most non-business uses? The "normal" there is probably
between a quarter and a half that.

Hmm. I'd guess 512MB ram is a pretty good average for the rich western
world atleast. New systems will tend to have more (particularily when
you include the fact that typical graphic-cards have 128 or 256MB by
their own....), but a few older systems with 256MB or even less are
probably still in use.



Eivind Kjorstad
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