Well, it is a million times smaller and a million times weaker. It accelerates from 28 to 40keV. So it a) already needs a pre-accelerator as input, and b) just adds about 35% to it.
Your run-of-the-mill CRT back in the times was an eccelerator, too, with something like 10keV, btw.
the fact that the shooty fat ass boy worked at all was a miracle
I thought at first you meant 28eV to 40keV and thought that's pretty impressive.
Not that I know the implications of either.
Saying something is smaller than the LHC (even by orders of magnitude) isn't that hot a take. Few partical accelleraters are not smaller than the LHC.
I've got an unconventional application idea for this particle accelerator on a chip.
True random number generation. There's loads of random information that can be measured from such a device in a controlled manner.
If you could fit one of these on a motherboard then you wouldn't even need to call a pseudo random number generator algorithm anymore, you can pull data directly from the chip.
There's already hardware RNGs on computer chips -- e.g. the RDRAND instruction on most x86 chips from the last decade or so uses a hardware entropy source as part of its behavior. The quality, of course, is one of those things people go "Uh, can I really trust this...?" about though.
Additionally, PRNGs still have uses even if you do trust hardware RNGs; determinism is a very useful property in software -- it is way, way easier to debug something deterministic (by running a PRNG with a specific seed over and over while testing) even if you want the final version to be randomized unpredictably for users. They also tend to be faster.
I’ve heard that you could pull random numbers from a basic thermometer. Is a hardware RNG just based on measuring the random noise of some measurement like that?
This documentation from Intel says of the entropy source that "The ES runs asynchronously on a self-timed circuit and uses thermal noise within the silicon to output a random stream of bits at the rate of 3 GHz." By thermal noise, I believe they mean this sort of noise but this is not my subject of expertise (I'm a programmer, not an EE or physicist). Not sure what AMD uses, but probably something similar, I'd expect.
You can already make/buy a Quantum RNG for truly random numbers.
Isn't the LHC large on purpose
Looks like 3D printing guys have another item to put on the bench next to their cnc machines and printer.