Not an electrical or computer engineer so I can't really speak on the limits of miniaturizing hardware in terms of physics or technological ability. But even if you can fit a full computer on a fingernail, it's gonna be hard to have a even just a USB-C connector on a finger nail. At a certain point, there's little reason to miniaturize computers further when they still have to interface with human usable devices. Instead of miniaturizing the board further, continuing to increase transistor density on the cpu and chips to get more compute power in the same area seems like the obvious focus for future miniaturization efforts.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 7 points 22 hours ago

We're at the point where you can fit an entire computer inside a USB cable end without it looking any different (beware of keyloggers if you're not using your own cables, they can even fit a wifi antenna in there)

[–] Kratzkopf@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I think this is also a part of the OP picture. I bet the raspberry Pi is vastly more powerful than that Elliot computer cabinet.

[–] kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Yeah, not even close.

That's an Elliott 405 computer. It could perform up to 500,000 instructions per second, aka FLoating-point Operations Per Second (FLOPS).

The other is a Raspberry Pi Zero which can perform 250,000,000 FLOPS, 500 times the Elliott 405.

And, the Elliott 405 cost between 140k-350k in 1957, depending on the features and configuration chosen. With inflation to 2015 dollars, that's $1.2-2.9 million ($2.40 per 1 FLOPS)

The Raspberry Pi Zero was their new low-power, low-cost board in 2015. It only cost $5 in 2015 (50 million FLOPS per $1)

And for an extra 30 bucks ($35 total) in 2015, you could have picked up a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, which is capable of 24,000,000,000 FLOPS. That is 96 times faster than the Pi Zero, and 48,000 times faster than the Elliott 405. (~686 million FLOPS per $1)