Stack Overflow Architecture in the year 2070

Question

So, I was reading Stack Overflow The Architecture - 2016 Edition [0] and one picture [1] shocked me. Five minutes ago I was reading about the IBM 360 mainframe (not sure how I ended in its Wikipedia entry). Anyway, the IBM 360 was big (big, for today standards of course), heavy and costly; my iPhone is a thousand times faster and fits in my pocket. So why did [1] shock me? I was thinking: "so, 50 years ago we had this IBM 360 thing, and now we have iPhones that are way more powerful. So, in 50 years would we be able to have a computer that fits in our pocket that has everything needed to deploy Stack Overflow?"I'm sure the rack in picture [1] is decent for today's standards but I couldn't help but think "wow, that rack looks, big, heavy and costly!".I was thinking about availability, performance, redundancy, security, etc. Do you think it would be possible to host the entire Stack Overflow site in my "2070 mobile phone" and serve with it millions of visitors as performant and secure as the current SO does?[0]: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/[1]: https://nickcraver.com/blog/content/SO-Architecture/SO-Architecture-RackB-Bottom.webp

d--b · Accepted Answer

A lot of stuff on this rack are here to allow the distribution of traffic across various services. So if you can fit everything on one box, you'd get rid of load balancers, routers, etc.
I think that by 2070, all the processing should fit comfortably on one chip, and all the data should fit in RAM next to it. And it's likely that by then, we'll also have Tb ethernet connections, that can withstand that kind of load.
So I would feel pretty confident that yes, in 50 years, this could fit in your pocket.

f0e4c2f7 · Answer

I think you might be ok on compute but bottleneck on bandwidth. Who knows though. Fun question.If you like exploring these kinds of ideas you might enjoy https://youtu.be/8pTEmbeENF4