by wasoxygen

Part 1: Bitcoins & Behemoth Datacenters

The world’s biggest datacenter, located near Reno, Nevada, has twice the square footage under its roof as does the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The latter is configured to house about 100,000 bio-processors (a.k.a. humans) each of which, not incidentally, generates about 100 watts of heat. Meanwhile the former houses some 200,000 silicon processers each of which both consumes over 100 watts of electricity and generates 100 watts of heat, 24x7.

Part 2: The Invisible & Voracious 'Information Superhighway'

Count on the massive proliferation of a new class of mobile base-stations to connect to an even greater proliferation of new mobile radios, and new kinds of mobile-enabled services. The global Small Cell Forum estimates that with 5G rollout starting soon, there will be over 70 million small cells installed in urban and industrial environments within a half-dozen years; i.e., a more than 10-fold increase over today’s network of cell base stations.

Part 3: The Digital 'Engines of Innovation' & Jevons' Delicious Paradox

One consequence of the trajectory of making logic engines both cheaper and more powerful is that overall spending on such engines has soared (a related variant of Jevons Paradox). Each year the world’s manufacturers now purchase some $300 billion worth of semiconductor engines in order to build and sell computing machines. That total is some 20% to 50% more than global spending on the piston engines used to build all the world’s wheeled transportation machines. And the former is growing faster than the latter.