Heck I hope this doesn't result in a bug fork happening; it's already a PITA to deal with fixing bugs that have been inherited from OOo bug trackers or earlier. You hit things like wanting to test against a file that used to be in a long dead bug tracker.

Does Mercury not have any useful radioactive material to provide more power?

I guess it might. I wouldn't plan on it without a very detailed survey though, to say the least. Whereas solar is definitely right there. (And you still have to worry about cooling either way.)

Are there reactor designs that could work up there? There's not much water for coolant.

There are other substances that can be used for reactor coolant. Molten salt reactors are actually substantially more efficient than water-cooled reactors because they have a higher operating temperature. You can also use liquid metal as coolant, such as lead or bismuth.

I did think 'Thunderbird' would be a more appropriate (named) use on a rocket :-)

Oh that's a weird way to do it; they used to have an x86 add on block for mainframes which was just a pile of x86 blades with some integration.

I loved the era of "daughter cards" which were just entire computers on a board.

things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6b4lYOI0GQ could get you a really interesting form of multitasking

From the perspective of PC building, I've always thought it would be neat if the CPU/storage/RAM could go on a card with a PCIe edge connector, and then that could be plugged into a "motherboard" that's basically just a PCIe multiplexer out to however many peripheral cards you have.

Maybe it's gimmicky, but I feel like you could get some interesting form factors with the CPU and GPU cards sitting back-to-back or side-by-side, and there would be more flexibility for how to make space for a large air cooler, or take it up again if you've got an AIO.

I know some of this already happens with SFF builds that use a Mini-ITX motherboard + ribbon cable to the GPU, but it's always been a little awkward with Mini-ITX being a 170mm square, and high end GPUs being only 137mm wide but up to 300mm in length.

Oh, going back to a backplane computer design? That could be cool, though I assumed we moved away from that model for electrical/signaling reasons? If we could make it work, it would be really cool to have a system that let you put in arbitrary processors, eg. a box with 1 GPU and 2 CPU cards plugged in

I believe PCIe is a leader/follower system, so there'd probably be some issues with that unless the CPUs specifically knew they were sharing, or there was a way for the non-leader units to know they they shouldn't try to control the bus.

But if we're dreaming, we can have the backplane be actually multiple (Nx thunderbird 5 cables connected each slot to all other slots directly).

Then each device can be a host, a client, at the same time and at full bandwidth.

If every device is directly connected to every other one of n devices with Thunderbolt cables, each with its own dedicated set of PCIe lanes, you'd be limited to 1/n of the theoretical maximum bandwidth between any two devices.

What you really want is for every device to be connected through a massive PCIe switch that allows PCIe lanes to be connected arbitrarily, so, e.g., a pair of EPYCs could communicate over 96 lanes with 32 lanes free to connect to peripheral devices.

That's basically what S-100 systems were, isn't it (on a much slower bus)?

There were also PC compatible systems based around ISA backplanes. This was especially common for industrial computers but Zenith/Heathkit made ISA backplane based systems for the business and consumer markets. I own a Zenith Z-160 luggable computer from 1984 which uses an 8 slot 8-bit ISA backplane. 1 slot is occupied by a CPU card which also has the keyboard connector. My system has 2 memory cards which each provide up to 320k along with a serial and parallel port. Zenith sold a desktop version of this as the Z-150. They later released models based upon 16-bit ISA backplanes. I think but am not sure of the top of my head that the last CPU they produced a 16-bit card for was the 486.

Yes, but also in many other scenarios. The last backplane systems I saw were 90s industrial 486s.

This was (is?) done - some strange industrial computers for sure and I think others, where the "motherboard" was just the first board on the backplane.

The transputer b008 series was also somewhat similar.

That would crush latency on RAM.

The RAM and CPU would still be on the same card together, and for the typical case of a single GPU it would just be 16x lanes direct from one to the other.

For cases where there are other cards, yes there would more contention, but few expansion cards are able to saturate more than a lane or two. One lane of PCIe Gen5 is a whopping 4 GB/s in each direction, so that theoretically handles a dual 10gige NIC on its own.

That's what I was hoping Apple was going to do with a refreshed Mac Pro.

I had envisoned a smaller tower design that with PCI slots and Apple developing and selling daughter cards that were basically just a redesigned macbook pro PCB but with a PCI-E edge connector and power connector.

The way I see it a user could start with a reasonably powerful base machine and then upgrade it over time and mix and match different daughter cards. A ten year old desktop is fine as a day to day driver, it just needs some fancy NPU to do fancy AI stuff.

This kind of architecture seems to make sense to me in an age where computers have such a longer usable lifespan and where so many features are integrated into the motherboard.

You can do basically that by connecting over Thunderbolt 5

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644

Homogenous RDMA is less like a daughterboard and more like a brother or sisterboard.

M5 processor plugged into the same RDMA as IBM POWER for that "brother from anothermotherboard".

Apple already experimented with this with the prototype Jonathan computer. It's very late 80's in its aesthetic, and I love it.

https://512pixels.net/2024/03/apple-jonathan-modular-concept...

This is the kind of glorious thing that will only appear when Moore's law is dead and buried.

Now we have cables that include computers more powerful than an old mainframe. So if it pleases you, just think of all the tiny little daughter computers hooked up to your machine now.

Or even Doom on your Beeb: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=32hJLwrk-gY

Speed and density.

Another possibility is that you tend to keep an eye on where your phone and laptop are; there have been some plane fires where people drop a phone into a seat and it ends up getting bent, but at least they notice it fairly quickly. (Will people know the direction if their USB-C power bank is charging from their phone or their phone is charging from their power bank?)

I hope you'll keep the fish happy.

Yeh, it seems odd to have the cut off cables, the wiring information...and then to go and buy a loom rather than bodging a cable at that point.

I wonder if it's a joke like Arm-Generative-Intelligence or something like that.

They say that it stands for AGentic AI.

I guess this is all set up to show off the new high-bandwidth-flash stuff that's due out soon?