Re:New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial bo...
by abandonliberty on Thursday January 14, 2021 @01:13AM
(#25772760)
Wired latencies are more limiting than you would expect! Light in glass in 2/3rds of that in a vacuum. At 2*10^8 the longest straight arc on earth would take 100ms to traverse in fibre optic cable.
Latency caused by the speed of light is a tangible and impactful factor in our lives!
It's amazing that something so incomprehensible (3x10^8 m/s) can actually be experienced.
Soon I realized I’d need the computers’ clocks to be as in-sync as possible, which in turn requires one-way latency calculations. I spent an hour diagramming with pencil and paper until I convinced myself it was mathematically impossible or I wasn’t clever enough to find the solution.
Looking back, I was more worried than I should’ve been about this (wired latencies are usually far less than 5ms, which for sound is ~1.5m) and less worried than I should’ve been about the fact that thunder isn’t anything close to a point source of sound.