jamesvandyke - Slashdot User

Comment Is mobile a good excuse? (Score 1) 362

by jamesvandyke on Friday August 13, 2010 @03:25PM (#33244502) Attached to: How Much Smaller Can Chips Go?

I wonder if the mobile chips are a good excuse to introduce the public to a new architecture. You start selling a phone with the new architecture where it's low risk and the software isn't entrenched. Then, scale it up for different devices until at some point you introduce it to desktops? It looks like this is what Apple is starting to do with the Cortex chips.

How Much Smaller Can Chips Go? 362

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 13, 2010 @12:46PM from the don't-call-me-tiny dept.

nk497 writes "To see one of the 32nm transistors on an Intel chip, you would need to enlarge the processor to beyond the size of a house. Such extreme scales have led some to wonder how much smaller Intel can take things and how long Moore's law will hold out. While Intel has overcome issues such as leaky gates, it faces new challenges. For the 22nm process, Intel faces the problem of 'dark silicon,' where the chip doesn't have enough power available to take advantage of all those transistors. Using the power budget of a 45nm chip, if the processor remains the same size only a quarter of the silicon is exploitable at 22nm, and only a tenth is usable at 11nm. There's also the issue of manufacturing. Today's chips are printed using deep ultraviolet lithography, but it's almost reached the point where it's physically impossible to print lines any thinner. Diffraction means the lines become blurred and fuzzy as the manufacturing processes become smaller, potentially causing transistors to fail. By the time 16nm chips arrive, manufacturers will have to move to extreme ultraviolet lithography — which Intel has spent 13 years and hundreds of millions trying to develop, without success."

How Star Trek Artists Imagined the iPad... 23 Years Later 324

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @12:22PM from the read-it-on-tos-yesterday dept.

MorderVonAllem submitted an incredibly cool article about the computers and set design of Star Trek. If you are into that sort of thing, you're going to really like this one. It says "There are a lot of similarities between Apple's iPad and the mobile computing devices—known as PADDs—used in the Star Trek universe. Ars spoke to designers Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler to find out the thinking and inspiration behind the PADD and how closely the iPad represents a real-life incarnation of that dream."

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