Yeah. It took me one calculation to determine that they will need quite a few of those A Clockwork Orange eye- holder opener thingies for this to happen. That would require that of the 6 billion people on Earth, 400 million people, or 15% of the population, to buy one of these in .2 seconds. I'm not even sure if there are 800 million people worldwide with a desktop or laptop computer.

The inverse proportion even runs to metaphors. I remember an ad or article or something a few years ago about how this speed-demon new CPU stole the poor engineer's coffee break -- well, now he'll get it back while the damn thing reboots. Maybe with a vacation thrown in for lagniappe.

Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]

I think a more interesting comparison would be Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct for the SNES. THAT was a big change...

But PC programmers are starting to get thier shit together, look at BeOS! Now if only we can get enough software ported to it...

I think a more interesting comparison would be Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct for the SNES. THAT was a big change...

But didn't many of the more impressive SNES games have an additional co-processor inside the cart? Not only can you not do that with a PSX CD-ROM, it hasn't been necessary to see the same increase in apparent power.

That said, the improvement on the PSX is mostly not from tighter game code itself (not saying this hasn't happened at all though), but from ditching the Sony C libraries and coding directly to the PlayStation hardware. You almost certainly don't wan't to be doing that in a general-purpose OS.

Ah, i nver thought of that. Thats probably explains why the KI cartrage got so damn hot on my SNES...

Um, yes, it could. It can. It's called either ACPI S4 (Suspend to disk) (when it works) or "Bloody F*#%@#@ C{+#" (when it doesn't)...

Michael "Brazil" Borgwardt --- Member of #WASHU# and Her would-be guinea-pig.

A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
YoMahz

Have you seen the reprint of K&R 2? It's the same number of pages as the copy I bought several years ago, but they used such a thick stock that the book is actually thicker than O'Reilly's "C++: The Core Language". It's nearly 3x as thick as my original copy. Absurd.

(Ok, so maybe the pages aren't 3mm thick, but still...)

Something tells me the author did the calculation for 3nm, not 30nm...

Will I be cursed as humor-impaired if I provide the blink constant: 0.33 seconds for the average human blink?

Thought so.

- My real name is Chris Gardner. I will be going live with it soon on The Dot.

A fatal exception 0E has occured. Please make sure that your computer is cooled to within 2K of absolute zero, and reboot.

With these chips, computers will be able to translate verbal commands or conversations from one language to another in real time, or search massive and complex optical databases.

Don't you just love the examples that are used to "show off" the speed of new chips to the masses? Is translating verbal commands in real time to another language really the killer app we've all been waiting for?

You: "Cocine una cena para mí!"
Computer: "Screw you."

Every major advance in the last 40 years has been due to increases in clock speed and switch density. Cute tricks like caching and dual-piping or whatever they're calling it this year are flea bites on the butt of real progress. Remember what an "advance" the 486 was over the 386? The corporate boojums need things to market so they make things up when there's nothing real in the pipe, but when something real comes along it doesn't have to be marketed to you because you sure as damn hell notice it.

I mean, my relatively nonobsolte PIII is real cool, but would it really be that much cooler than a machine with 486-level architecture running at the same 450 MHz? For that matter I have to wonder how my tired old 8-bit friends would fare if one could run them at a good fraction of a GHz. Sure, you buy some extra clocks with all those extra transistors trying to second-guess look-ahead your code, but I wonder if that's the best use of all that high-speed silicon. Maybe a *cough* beowulf cluster */cough* of, say, Z80-level CPUs all fabbed on one chip and running at 1GHz could do some really interesting things by comparison.

If this thing is real then great for Intel and for us, it doesn't really matter what architecture they apply it to; and if it isn't real it won't save them when something that is does come along, not matter how good their press releases are.

Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]

You obviously know very little about computer engineering. There have been many, many advances besides fitting more transistors on a chip.

1. Out-of-order instruction scheduling (branch prediction, pipelining, etc.)
2. RISC design 'philosophy'
3. IC Design tools (simulations, etc.)
4. Advances in vital subsystems (memory bus, RAM, controllers, etc.)

These techniques would have all been possible without transistor size advances beyond the original 8088 level. And you could probably name a few more but I don't know that many yet.

Realistically speaking, we don't know what the future will hold for computing. People are talking about quantum devices (have interesting mathematical properties) and optical devices (good for fiber optics)

"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson

In any case, what is wrong with using a smaller process? If it makes the chip faster/cooler, I don't see any reason to complain.

--
I used to hate computers, but then a server went down on me.

Mechanical penguins love transistors. The Linux Pimp

--It's Pimptastic!--

• TTL - "Standard" BJT logic. Appears in many forms that fairly compatible with one another.
• ECL - BJT logic based on operating the BJTs in saturation, leading to big power usage. Needs negative power supply.
• NMOS - MOSFET logic using just n-channel devices.
• CMOS - MOSFET logic using both n and p-channel devices.
• BiCMOS - design using the advantages of both BJTs and MOSFETs, ie. low static current requirements for the MOSFETs and higher drive of the BJTs.

I must admit that I was quite surprised by the reaction my comments garnered. I didn't mean to infer that the transitor was a bad thing or a stupid invention. I think it's great that companies are continually improving products and making processors faster and smaller. I was simply pointing out the fact that the computer industry seems to sustain itself on evolutionary advances, not revolutionary advances. I consider the invention of the transistor to be a revolutionary breakthrough, I guess I'm just suprised that, to my knowledge, the computer industry hasn't embraced a wider array of research.

--It's Pimptastic!--

Who cares about innovation, progress, science?

Every tool reaches a level of development after which no further development is necessary or usefull. A framing hammer made today is essentially the same as a framing hammer made twenty years ago because there's no useful improvement to be made. A head machined to a nanometer's accuracy or a handle make of some wacky wundermaterial would not make my hammer any more useful to me.

Instead, progress goes into a different kind of tool. My wood and metal hammer is fine for my occasional homeowner projects, but someone with more carpentry ambition would also have a high-tech nailgun.

Same with computers. There comes a point where the typical consumer just doesn't need any more power. That's why you can still find new P-90 systems being sold - for a personal net access/word processing box, that's enough. There are many people who are no more interested in playing Quake III or doing video editing on their PC than I am in building an addition to my house as a DIY project.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
U.S. Gov't-in-Exile: http://www.USGovernment-in-Exile.org

What I can't see is how one can lay down anything 3 atoms thick (or wide) reliably (in the sense of real-world mass manufacture, not one of a time in-the-lab productions) using scaled versions of existing Fab tachnologies and without some nano-assembler type technology. Worst case you'll get 3 atoms somewhere in the middle of the wafer and maybe 5 or 0 at the edges ....

This sort of tech will come one day - but I beleive it's going have to be by revolution, not evolution ....

A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
YoMahz

A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
YoMahz

A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
YoMahz

A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
YoMahz

This will be like the first discussion of that kind.. oh, no, what am I thinking. Ofcourse there WILL be Intel bashing... C'mon, the guys are trying to invent/achieve something. Give them some credits.

Congrats, Intel crew!

YMMV, IANMAQP, ETC

for email address, hold monitor up to mirror

Yes it does, but that doesn't mean it can't happen on the scale of one or two atoms. Consider: water only converts to a gas at 100 Celcius, yet it evaporates. How? The water at the surface attains a kinetic energy sufficient to transform it into a gas. Similarly, freak quantum interactions will cause the occasional atom to convert to a different element. It doesn't take that much energy, since we're not talking about all that much mass here.

Statistically, a lump of lead could undergo spontaneous fission, but the odds of it happening are on par with the chances of every molecule of air in the room suddenly evacuating itself, leaving you gasping for breath. On a long enough time scale, everything in the universe does this; eventually it all turns into iron (and then neutronium, and then black holes, and then evaporates, but let's not quibble).

--
If you can't learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it poorly.

Dyolf Knip

I have no idea what your point about the air evacuating itself is. There is no probability, however small you think it may be, that the air from a room will somehow disappear.

Spoken like someone who has never taken Quantum Mechanics 101.

for email address, hold monitor up to mirror

It's a really cool idea. There is indeed a nonzero probability that all the molecules of air in a room will hit each other in just the right way so that they all leave the room through an open window. Imagine a game of pool with a few quintillion balls on a table the size of Russia, all of which are sunk on the first shot. Similar idea for sponteneous nuclear shifts.

The world of quantum mechanics is governed by laws of probabilities. There is very little that is outright forbidden, some events are just so unlikely to occur that they never do.

--
If you can't learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it poorly.

Dyolf Knip

Dyolf Knip

Imagine a monitor with 10 billion dpi!

... and imagine the graphics card/OS needed to utilize it ...

Damn, you have good eyes ;-)

Dyolf Knip

If the amount of heat generated is anything close to current processors, having a chip that densely populated would likely self destruct. As it is my Ahtlon 900 runs rather toasty, even with a giant copper heatsink/fan assembly.

Maybe those guys playing with liquid nitrogen as a coolant are on to something...

Of course it'll first be used for solving mathematical problems (much as the original electronic comps were)..but it'll still take 50 years after the innovation to bring the software for a quantum computer to the point where we have electronic software today.

By then we'll all be dead. Wouldnt it be amusing if our grandkids were working on the exact same projects we are..only for quantum comps :)

-Anonymous Coward should be done away with, enforce standing by your words-

Still, I suppose when your dealing with something that small your going to see a fair few small signal effects that your gonna have to fix =).
--
Jon - CORE Oceanian Nerd NewsCast

Is this news for nerds? or is this "hey we want to be market analysts"?

- end of line

Intel has been using the same basic archetecture for the past 20 years.

The question that must be posed after bitching about Intel's dogged adherence to the x86 architecture is how will you get the world to change from x86 when we are already heading towards the dream of one billion connected devices, all using x86? If we suddenly decide to change to a completely new way of processing then we are going to render all of these one billion connected devices entirely obsolete - and you thought you had enough trouble keeping up with clock speed changes!

It's the same problem with the oil industry. There are too many people who have invested too much time, people and money into petroleum fuel for it to be chucked away at a moment's notice. That's the reason we're not driving Hydrogen-fuelled fuel cell cars now. So it obviously seems that if Intel won't make the switch to the next level (whatever that is) then we're going to be using the same old shit for the next 20 years!

Self Bias Resistor
Computer: A device that multiplies a user's ability to make mistakes.

Intel's gotten badly burned a couple of times lately trying to lead the market places it didn't want to go. Why on earth do you think we'd try to lead it away from "x86" any faster than the Itanium line can carry it?

Intel's gotten badly burned a couple of times lately trying to lead the market places it didn't want to go.

True, Intel's previous efforts to introduce technology that goes beyond x86 but that can easily be explained by the introduction of such technologies when the market was not ready. So the question here is, when will the market be ready? Most likely when serious deficiencies are shown to be inherent in x86 and the demand for better stuff is there. That's the key. Supply and demand. There's absolutely no use having supply if there's no demand.

Self Bias Resistor
Imagination is more important than knowledge. - Albert Einstein

Michael "Brazil" Borgwardt --- Member of #WASHU# and Her would-be guinea-pig.

This one as some info on the physics in such small scale devices.
--
Jon - CORE Oceanian Nerd NewsCast

And who called it a law? That is so egoist and quite frankly weird.

Theories cannot be derived from facts. The demand to admit only those theories which follow from facts leaves us without any theory. Hence, science as we know it can exist only if we drop the demand and revise our methodology.

I am disheartened by your bourgousie appeal to democracy and the government as agents for change. As any student of history can tell you, government is and always has been the tool of the rich. You cannot expect an institution founded and controlled by the rich to disturb the status quo. Only a bottom-up surge of populist fervor can rock the boat enough to make it over-turn.

Moore's 'Law' is supersition; part of a belief system no more 'correct' or useful than Christianity in the Dark Ages. It's part of an economic and social system that keeps the down-trodden supressed. Any defender of Moore's Law must be prepared to defend the entire capitalist religion. Are you prepared to do this?

Did you mean "One point twenty one gigawatts!!!!"

Now get back to work on that flux capacitor.