Enrico Fermi makes another appearance
If you’ve ever heard the name Enrico Fermi and know a little bit about him I applaud you. If you don’t, and I didn’t blame you, then allow me to begin to fill in the blanks.
Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist who liked to play around with radiation. He ended up dying of stomach cancer when he was 53. You can’t really blame the guy because he worked without a suit (this was before they knew how important a suit could be for that sort of thing) and was really good at what he did.
I’m going to skip over his early life and whatnot and mainly jump to how much stuff he ended up getting his name tacked onto or ended up being a part of.
In no particular order: he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, there is a synthetic element called Fermium, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, Fermions, Fermi level, Fermi acceleration, Fermi Hole, Fermi Linux, Fermi problem, Fermi’s Golden Rule, the Fermion Field, the Fermi method, the Fermi Paradox, he took part in the Manhattan Project, contributed to the fields of general relativity, quantum mechanics, atomic physics,quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, statistical mechanics and induced radioactivity. Oh and I forgot to mention he built the first nuclear reactor.
If you skipped last bit, Fermi is a Boss. Most likely THE Boss.
In more recent times another incredible invention has received the title Fermi.
Nividia’s Fermi GPU based on CUDA architecture.
If this thing works the way its supposed to then your computer might as well be on the computer equivalent of ritalin. With automatic error correction this cuts down on the problems with such a high level, somewhat radiant process which would normally cause “soft errors” in the system. 3 billion transistors, 512 CUDA cores, and the ability to work significantly well with parallel processing chips makes this thing a beast. If Nvidia’s Fermi chip lives up to Nvidia’s hype and the Fermi name then this thing might as well drop radioactive gold turds every time it takes a dump.
I just hope for the sake of Fermi’s good name that this thing does all its supposed to and more.
