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by getsaf 4319 days ago
Not much perspective to be had here unless you are assuming a single photon's distance traveled.

The analogy breaks down when you consider thousands or millions/billions of photons traveling simultaneously, then you can measure in miles.

A single photon's travel-distance doesn't mean much in this context.

2 comments

As far as I know, those 9 centimetres are still the fundamental speed limit for information to travel.
That's really what makes me fear about how far we can push our processors. I don't think Moore's law will hold a lot longer for CPUs, unless we manage to get very good quantum computers very soon.
I think it's a great way to put it in perspective for me at least, light is the fastest thing in the universe it's the ultimate constant for reference. We could measure computation in light-cycles similarly as we do with lightyears for really long distances. I don't get frequencies like I do distances, I think it's because I deal with distances all the time but less so with frequencies.