
Printing Presses Are Giant GPUs - ingve
https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0038
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jayd16
They don't do any processing except maybe the subtractive blend of putting ink
over other ink. Presses are pipelines so you get some pipeline type
similarities and sure they deal with images but a meh. A press is more similar
to a monitor than a GPU, I would think.

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Animats
Printing presses are interesting machines, but they are not at all related to
GPUs. Although newer ones probably have cameras looking at what's coming out
and a GPU processing the imagery. Presses used to have a huge number of manual
adjustments to ink flow for how much of each color is being used for each
column. That's been automated for years, because you went through a lot of
paper during manual tuning.

And yes, there are presses that do plate changes on the fly.[1] For "those
profitable short-run jobs".

Printing is a dying industry, though. Printing huge amounts of paper to be
thrown away the next day is over.

[1] [https://youtu.be/0KwO6LMp-aM](https://youtu.be/0KwO6LMp-aM)

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onion2k
_Printing is a dying industry, though. Printing huge amounts of paper to be
thrown away the next day is over._

Presses are used for more than just newspapers.

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timw4mail
The big jobs are much rarer, and the volume of print jobs is much smaller,
though.

There will always be printing, but it is a much smaller niche than it used to
be.

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jfim
That video at the end is pretty amazing. In the video, they mention that the
press runs at 15 m/s (54 km/h, 33.55 mph) and that it operates 24 hours a day.

Doing the math, this machine ingests over 800 linear miles of paper per day.
Crazy!

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no_protocol
Printing presses are also giant, asynchronous CPUs. Depending on what you put
in, they can cause society to take certain actions.

Perhaps in recent years their effectiveness has been dwindling, though.

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KaiserPro
Here is a fun(ish) writeup of a tour around a printing press in the UK:
[https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/photos/newspaper-
manafacture...](https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/photos/newspaper-manafacture-
the-zenith-of-a-dead-medium/)

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pgtan
It's not GPU, it's called RIP - Raster Image Processor. And yes, one of the
benefits of print is, that it is already pre-rendered. Waiting for a PDF
reader/browser to show a complex vector image is just annoying.

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kd5bjo
The article is interesting, but the title is clickbait in that he never really
tries to make the argument claimed in the title. Instead, he looks at both
GPUs and printing presses as generic image formation devices and compares them
on those terms.

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jbverschoor
Also, GPUs are made using printing technology

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fouc
In the future, computers will be built according to mechanical principles at
the nanotechnology level.

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ganzuul
Paper mills and perhaps these machines too could be Turing complete, and very
similar to Turing's original machine with infinite tape, if they perform some
kind of online process control.

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layoutIfNeeded
Yes, printing presses are giant GPUs. Also, my mom is a steam locomotive
because she drinks a lot of water.

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abbiya
Can we make a small printing press with GPUs?

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maztaim
I am waiting for the connection to urbit. It's gotta be there somewhere....

