Orson Wang
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2016–2025
5:12 · 12M views · Jan 27, 2010
A Mandelbrot set zoom animation reaching a magnification of about 2.1x10^275, claimed as the deepest at the time (January 2010). Each frame was rendered separately over six months on 12 CPU cores.
HN uses it as a reference point for how deep Mandelbrot zooms can go and how much compute they once took.
4 comments from Hacker News
Probably, I wonder what code they use for this: [LINK] because deeper zoom requires much higher precision math which takes a lot more computation. PS: Not as far but much better video: this video
In 1986 we wrote a parallel Mandelbrot program in assembly instructions in the 2K or 4K on-chip SRAM of 17 x T414 Transputer chips linked together with 4 x 10 Mbps links each into a cheap supercomputer [1]. It drew the 512 x 342 pictures on a Mac 128K as terminal at around 10 seconds per picture. I later wrote the quadruple-precision floating-point calculations in microcode [2] to speed it up by a factor of 10 and combined 52 x T414 with 20 x T800 Transputers with floating point hardware into a larger supercomputer costing around $50K. With this cheap 72 core supercomputer it still would have taken years to produce the deep zoom of the Mandelbrot set [4] that took them 6 months with 12 CPU cores running 24/7 in 2010 [3]. In 2024 we can buy a $499 M4 Mac mini (20-36 'cores') and calculate it a a few days. If I link a few M4s together with 3x32 Gbps Thunderbolt links into a cheap supercomputer and write the assembly code for all the 36 cores (CPU+GPU+Neural Engine) I can render the deep zoom Mandelbrot almost in realtime (30 frames per second). That is Moore's law in practice. The T414 had 900,000 transistors, the M4 has 28 billion transistors at 3nm (31.111 times larger at 50% of the price). The M2 Ultra with 134 billion transistors and M4 Max (estimate 100 billion transistors) are larger chips than a M4 but they are relatively more expensive then the M4 so it is cheaper and faster to link together 13 x M4 than buy 1 x M2 Ultra or 6 x M4 instead of 1 x M4 Max. Cerebras or NVid
No, I mean that at a certain level of zoom the fractal appears to stop being generated, and I end up just zooming into pixel blocks. For example, if you try to recreate this video you can only for for a bit before the fractal appears to stop generating.
It crazy how far computers have improved so this is the kind of thing you can do as a hobby project. this video