There is a new innovation in electronics which will renew the computing industry:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor This two port device is "written" by a voltage and duration (fixing its resistance) and "read" by a much lower voltage. Moore was banging his head against quantum physics with transistors approaching 250 atoms in size; but, the memristor will renew the law. Unlike dynamic ram, the memristor does not need to be refreshed so that, when you turn your computer on, it will "instantly" return to the state prior to power off. IEEE Spectrum has several articles including the story of how the device was built: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/dec08/7024 Terry On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 5:55 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > It is common knowledge that in the not so distant future hard disks will be > replaced with solid state memory, and MPP architecture will become > commonplace. No doubt computers will run thousands of times faster than they > do now, just as today's computers run anywhere from 1000 to 100,000 times > faster than personal computers did circa 1980 (my estimate -- I would like > to see a more authoritative estimate). > > Anyway, I would like to make a prediction about these upcoming machines. > Despite the fact that they will run thousands of times faster, I predict > that it will still take two minutes to turn Windows on. And to turn it off, > for crying out loud! Why it takes so long to terminate a program is a > mystery. The disk access light flutters and twitches, but the program gives > no hint what it is up to. By the standards of 1980 these things are > supercomputers and in two minutes you could probably enumerate every person > in the U.S. Anyway, two minutes seems to be a built-in computer constant, > along with the price of whatever computer you want to buy, which Dave Barry > defined as: "$500 more than you hoped to pay." > > - Jed >
