Well I like the vapor-deposition diamond thing. You'd slice the diamond into thin wafers and treat it just like silicon, except it conducts heat way better. I think it's already cheap enough to trivialize the cost of the thickness you'd want for a chip, but they are working on making usefully wide chunks so you can have big wafers for mass manufacturing just like silicon.
I think we're zooming to the future, but there is a wall in our future. Heisenberg will limit how many FLOPS we can do per chunk of stuff, even if's it Legendary Dark Matter in the Vacuum, and Einstein will limit communicating results from Proxima Centauri even after it's been converted to pure Heisenberg Max Dense Supercomputer. The funny thing is that we may experience this collision in our lifetimes, because we're going so fast and the rate we are quicking, etc; so I'm an optimistic (like Kurzweil) on the local scale, but a pessimist on the global one. S curves may all break, but they converge to a limiting S curve. History is full of disappointing limitations (you can't express the square root of two as a quotient of intgers?? But all numbers are quotients of integers!!) only to discover we can live with it (ok, so we do arithmetic with irrationals, d'uh). I think converting the mass of Jupitor to (approximately) maximum deliverable FLOPS per gram will be enough to keep me amused modelling. Of course the competition for CPU time will be....astronomical. Peter On 3/14/07, Joe Landman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Robert G. Brown wrote: > So I'm not holding my breath on ML running out this week or next. I'm > more interested in speculating on when the next massive superML jump on > TOP of ML will occur, when the next phase/paradigm shift is due that Ah.... Ok, my concern is that silicon may be running out of room. Now if we all just put on our happy faces, and use GaAs, we can go much faster. Yeah, it has some issues ... But think of how much faster we can be. (that and my thesis work might suddenly have applicability, but that is another matter). More seriously, our computing industry can build silicon really well. As it keeps shrinking problems arise. Some of these problems can be ameliorated by doing a material paradigm shift. But our computing industry does silicon really well ... Joe -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics LLC, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 786 8423 fax : +1 734 786 8452 or +1 866 888 3112 cell : +1 734 612 4615
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