Clearing Out The In-Box -- The Jevons Paradox -- March 28, 2026

Locator: 50350COMPUTE.

Personal computers: entering the AI world. Link here. New AI apps on personal computers can now do in seconds compared to hours for supercomputers to do the same calculations. Tag: DIMON.

Gilding the lily: Jensen Huang was said to have recently said that his supercomputer in Plano, TX, is the fastest supercomputer in the world. What does a chatbot have to say?

Scientific supercomputers vs AI-computers. The next frontier. Link here.

Scientific computing and artificial intelligence were once separate worlds, using different kinds of calculations on distinctly different hardware. But the two fields are steadily merging, as shown by a massive new machine coming to Berkeley, Calif.

On Thursday, the Department of Energy’s laboratory near the University of California, Berkeley, said it had selected Dell Technologies to deliver its next flagship supercomputer in 2026. The system will use Nvidia chips tailored for A.I. calculations and the simulations common to energy research and other scientific fields.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory expects the new machine — to be named for Jennifer Doudna, a Berkeley biochemist who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize for chemistry — to offer more than a tenfold speed boost over the lab’s most powerful current system. If fully outfitted, the machine could be the Energy Department’s biggest resource for tasks like training A.I. models, said Jonathan Carter, associate laboratory director for computing sciences at the Berkeley center.

The supercomputer stands out for its technology choices, which indicate the growing desire for government labs to adopt more technologies from commercial A.I. systems. Nvidia chips, though widely used by big cloud companies as well as in supercomputers, were passed over by the Energy Department for three previous record-setting machines that were assembled by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Dell has hardly been a player in the highest end of the supercomputer market, but it has had success in large commercial A.I. installations.

Also: lines blurring between supercomputing and high-performance computers. Link here. February 27, 2025, Semiconductor Engineering. 

This is an incredibly good background article. Must-read if interested in this subject. Hopefully, the link doesn't break any time soon. The bottom line for me: Jensen Huang may be right -- the fastest supercomputer in the world is now sited in Plano, TX.  

Personal computers: market share -- 

• overall
• HP Inc: usually holds the lead, at 25%
• Dell: generally the "Avis" position at 23% to 25%
• Apple: rapid growth; premium market; 14% to 15%or
• Android: 
• HP Inc and Dell, almost the entire enchilada
• non-Android: 
• Apple

Bottom line: looking back at DIMON (above), a lot of folks have supercomputers sitting on their desks. 

 

Google: TurboQuant. Link here. One needs to read the entire story, not just the headline. Jevons Paradox, link here. This seems to be a no-brainer. Someone gets a wiki page for stating that as things get less expensive, folks buy more? Quick: was Jevons English or Scottish? By the way, I misread what he actually said and why what he said is important. He was English, by the way. Read the wiki link regarding the history and development of the Jevons Paradox.