On 27 April 2015 at 19:22, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]> wrote:
> LizR wrote: > >> Yes that's more of less what SA said - they've got around the clock speed >> limit by multiplying cores, but they can't get around the fact that >> components can't be scaled below (I think) 14nm without that transistors >> leaking electrons - at least not without some radical new technology. So it >> was about whether some new paradigm is on the way to keep things heading >> towards the what's his name - begins with L I think's - limit. (Memristors >> nanotubes etc) >> > > Actually, what I took from the article was that future improvements in > computing are going to be driven by the commercial imperative of profits. > This is not likely to happen by pursuing faster processors and memory chips > per se. > "...our vision of computers themselves is evolving. It turns out that we > do not want stand-alone, oraclelike "thinking machines" as much as late > 20th-century science-fiction writers thought we would. ... Instead, the > relentless pursuit of lower cost per function will be driven by so-called > heterogeneous computing." > > I think it goes without saying that the whole enterprise is mainly driven by the profit motive (although of course there have been significant injections from other areas, little things like the internet!) But the profit motive requires that people keep buying, and that requires that computers (in all their forms) continue to improve, since they don't tend to wear out THAT quickly. As someone one told me, the safest thing you can do to avoid losing your precious data is set up computers for specific functions - one to do word processing, for example - and keep them disconnected from the outside world; once they do what you want, never upgrade anything. We have in fact done this with an old Windows XP PC which is only *ever* used for putting home videos onto DVDs (although nowadays we don't do that so often, memory sticks being the medium of choice now). However, most people want the latest gadgets, and regularly upgrade desktop and laptop computers, but they only do so because they have continually improved in performance in various ways, enabling software to keep getting more features (some consider this a bad thing, but anyway - as a heavy user of Word and various other applications I have found myself forced to keep running to stand still...) What interested me was the ideas about how they might go about continuing to meet this challenge, insofar as I could grasp them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
