I'm pretty sure I was off by a decade, at least, but let's see...
Heftiest Intel i7 is these days about 1.2 billion transistors. That'll work for a very crude multiplier.
I saw an interesting video somewhere where they showed one byte of radio tube technology. Basically it was the necessary valves for keeping the data in, a mess of components attached, and rails to make them somewhat swappable, whenever something failed. Quick guesstimate for the size, about 20 cm x 20 cm x 5 cm. That is, 0.002 cubic meters.
Multiply something small with something huge, we get 2.4 million cubic meters. Make it a cube... and it's about 134 meters (440 ft) per side.
Turn it into something nice and flat, say ten meters high, then we'll get 240 thousand square meters. To which Wikipedia says that it's about the same size as the largest statesian shopping mall, maybe a bit larger.
This of course assumes that the whole place is nothing but radio tubes, and they somehow magically work without crawlspaces and massive pipes for cooling systems. And I haven't even seen the big malls really, so I've no clue about that. I went to see some local mall thingie in Seattle, and even that seemed pretty huge to me. The place where I live seems so much smaller now... :-)
In the end, I'm pretty happy with my estimate about how wrong I was as well, multiply a medium-sized mall by ten, and maybe it's getting pretty close. :-)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2013-05-08 08:42 pm (UTC)Heftiest Intel i7 is these days about 1.2 billion transistors. That'll work for a very crude multiplier.
I saw an interesting video somewhere where they showed one byte of radio tube technology. Basically it was the necessary valves for keeping the data in, a mess of components attached, and rails to make them somewhat swappable, whenever something failed. Quick guesstimate for the size, about 20 cm x 20 cm x 5 cm. That is, 0.002 cubic meters.
Multiply something small with something huge, we get 2.4 million cubic meters. Make it a cube... and it's about 134 meters (440 ft) per side.
Turn it into something nice and flat, say ten meters high, then we'll get 240 thousand square meters. To which Wikipedia says that it's about the same size as the largest statesian shopping mall, maybe a bit larger.
This of course assumes that the whole place is nothing but radio tubes, and they somehow magically work without crawlspaces and massive pipes for cooling systems. And I haven't even seen the big malls really, so I've no clue about that. I went to see some local mall thingie in Seattle, and even that seemed pretty huge to me. The place where I live seems so much smaller now... :-)
In the end, I'm pretty happy with my estimate about how wrong I was as well, multiply a medium-sized mall by ten, and maybe it's getting pretty close. :-)