Rod Logic

From The Transhumanist Wiki

From the SL4 Lexicon:

Rod Logic:

A mechanical nanocomputer built using diamondoid rods of a few thousand atoms each. Even though messages can only move at the speed of sound in diamond (~17 km/s == ~6 x 1e-5 c), and the calculations in "Nanosystems" assume ~12 km/s, the very small size of the components would enable an individual rod-logic CPU containing 10^6 transistor-like rod-logic interlocks to operate at 1GHz clock speeds, executing instructions at ~1000 MIPS. The power consumption for a 1GHz CPU is estimated to be ~60nW. The calculations are performed for 300 Kelvin (room temperature). The error rate is 1e-64 per transistor operation, effectively negligible. (However, the half-life against radiation damage for an unshielded CPU in Earth ambient background radiation is only ~100 years.)

The usual summary is that a one-kilogram, one-cubic-centimeter nanocomputer can contain 10^12 nanocomputers, consume 100kW (and dissipate 100kW of heat - cooling systems are also described), to deliver 10^21 instructions per second (10^15 MIPS, ten thousand billion billion operations per second). The overall system has a clock speed ~10^6 times faster than the maximum firing rate of a biological neuron, and delivers total computing capacity ~10^4 times the upper-bound estimate for the human brain (~10^14 synapses operating at ~200 hz == ~10^17 ops/second).

There are more speculative electronic nanocomputer schemas that would allow ~10^25 operations per second; also, assuming a parallel-CPU architecture may be conservative when dealing with seed AIs. However, Rod Logics are easy to analyze and provide a definite lower bound on the computing speeds achievable with Molecular Manufacturing technology Yudkowsky01.