We shouldn’t call phones pocket supercomputers we should call old desktops and mainframes subcomputers

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

I was a computer till 2018 or so. Been a subcomputer since. My extended memory performance is worsening steadily. I’m a walking Von Neumann bottleneck now.

Maybe a device isn’t meaningfully a computer unless memory (tape) is effectively infinite for the programs on it. A computer becomes a subcomputer when improvement rate becomes memory limited. AI computers are hitting that wall now. Earlier it was improving faster than Moore’s law because memory headroom.