On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 07:58:07PM +0530, K. K. Subramaniam wrote: > On Thursday 27 Oct 2011 11:27:39 PM BGB wrote: > > most likely, processing power will stop increasing (WRT density and/or > > watts) once the respective physical limits are met (basically, it would > > no longer be possible to get more processing power in the same space or > > using less power within the confines of the laws of physics).
We're very, very far removed from these limits. > The adoption of computing machines at large is driven primarily by three > needs > - power (portable), space/weight and speed. The last two are now solvable in > the large but the third one is still stuck in the "dark ages". I recollect a > joke by Dr An Wang (founder of Wang Labs) in keynote during the 80s that goes > something like this: It's pretty obvious the era of CMOS will end somehen around 5 nm, this being still flatland (or 2.1 d at least). We do have multiple candidate alternatives in the pipeline, coming from spintronics, plasmonics, FeRAM, memristors and other approaches, which would be static, i.e. requiring no power to hold state, little energy to flip state, and be used both for storage and processing, allowing you runtime-reconfigurable sea of logic. This will also usher in the era of real 3d integration, with otherwise would tend to corium-like failure modes should your cooling fail. > A man struggled to lug two heavy suitcases into a bogie in a train that was > just about to depart. A fellow passenger helped him in and they start a > conversation. The man turns out to be a salesman from a company that made > portable computers. He showed one that fit in a pocket to his fellow > passenger. > "It does everything that a mainframe does and more and it costs only $100". > "Amazing!" exclaimed the passenger as he held the marvel in his hands, "Where > can I get one?". "You can have this piece," said the gracious gent, "as thank > you gift for helping me." "Thank you very much." the passenger was thrilled > beyond words as he gingerly explored the new gadget. Soon, the train reached > the next station and the salesman stepped out. As the train departed, the > passenger yelled at him. "Hey! you forgot your suitcases!". "Not really!" the > gent shouted back. "Those are the batteries for your computer". As I've just ordered a 11000 mAh external battery along with a fanny pack in order to power my cellular >24 h with GPS, cellular and code running full tilt I find your joke distinctly *unfunny* (somewhat resembling Onion, because it's indistinguishable from reality). > ;-) .. Subbu -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
