How many vacuum tubes would one need to achieve the same computing power of an iphone? And how big and energy consuming would the whole device need to be?<br>Thought about it when Harry was describing the size of the collider that would allow us to take a snapshot of a string.<br><br>Not that I believe they exist, not that I don't. May it be a Scrödinger comment.,(reply>), @Mikhail Franco Can I call u a friend?,(reply>), Apple's A13 Bionic chip contains 8.5 billion transistors.<br>Assume a vacuum tube functions as one transistor<br>and power consumption is about 10 W each.<br>So the iVacuum phone would need 85 GW,<br>which is almost 4x output from the world's largest power station<br>the Three Gorges Dam in China (22.5 GW),<br>or 44x output from the Hoover Dam in the USA (2 GW).<br>A vacuum tube might be 150 cc, say 200 cc with mounting and wiring,<br>but the actual density of packing would be limited by the cooling.<br>A typical data center cabinet is 1.2 m^3, which could physically fit 6000 tubes,<br>but the power and cooling budget of 6 kW allows only about a tenth of that.<br>So at 600 tubes per cabinet, it would need 390,000 full height 42u cabinets.<br>The worlds biggest data centers typically consume about 1 GW in 150 acres.<br>So one iVacuum would probably need about 20 sq miles (50 km^2).<br>Unless you assemble 85 1GW nuclear reactors,<br>the only place on earth that would have enough power is<br>western Yunnan Province in China, assuming you could dam the<br>upper Yangtze, Mekong, Salween," and you'd probably need the <br>Brahmaputra and Irrawaddy as well.<br><a href=""https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Parallel_Rivers"">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Parallel_Rivers</a>"