DailyDirt: It's Not Just A Good Idea… It's Moore's Law
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Computers are such an important part of our daily lives now that it’s difficult to imagine how we could get along without them sometimes. Obviously, people do. But growing accustom to supercomputer capabilities available at our fingertips all the time is much more than a luxury. We expect computers to get better and better at an astonishing (exponential) rate, but will we notice if/when that rate slows down? Here are just a few links on keeping up — or possibly exceeding — the performance expectations that Moore’s Law has instilled in us.
- IBM has unveiled a 7nm chip — the world’s first commercially-viable and functioning chip using silicon-germanium materials produced with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. Moore’s Law is beginning to show some cracks now, but this test chip shows the game isn’t over just yet. [url]
- A working memory-crunching computer (memcomputer) prototype (the first of its kind) has been demonstrated by solving an NP-complete problem. This kind of computer requires a completely different design so that it can simultaneously process and store information — unlike conventional computers which can’t. Memprocessors (built from components such as memristors, memcapacitors, etc) can be made, but scaling them up is still a challenge — so it’ll be a while before anyone is making a memsupercomputer (or a supermemcomputer?). [url]
- Ditching transistors (or even memristors) completely could be a solution to ridiculously fast computers, and the way to get there might be quantum computing qubits. The trick is constructing qubits that are stable, error-free and scalable. So far, a 1000+ qubit computer has been made recently, but this quantum computer requires various superconducting components chilled to a nearly absolute zero temperature — so it won’t be used in laptops anytime soon. [url]
After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.
Filed Under: computing, memcomputer, memcomputing, memristors, moore's law, np complete, quantum computing, qubits, silicon, supercomputers, transistors
Companies: d-wave, hp, ibm
Comments on “DailyDirt: It's Not Just A Good Idea… It's Moore's Law”
what a crock of crap
“We expect computers to get better and better at an astonishing (exponential) rate, but will we notice if/when that rate slows down?”
Things have already slowed down and it happened more than 20 years ago. I can remember working with Lotus123 and thinking it was great most of the time, but it would sometimes take 2-3 seconds to return. That was annoying. That is absolutely *normal* with todays spreadsheets. Response times should be near instantaneous and they are not. Using a computer is often a disruption of the thought process because of feature bloat.
Computers should be fast. They are not. They haven’t been for twenty years.
It’s sad when you have to dump tables to disk then use perl to glean info out of them because using the normal user interface is so excruciatingly slow.
Re: what a crock of crap
What the hardware guys give, the software guys take back.
Leaving you back where you started.
But Moore’s Law isn’t crap. It’s just balanced by the anti-Moore’s Law of Software Bloat.
Re: Re: what a crock of crap
Mod up OldMugwunp. You have nailed it.
Re: Re: Re: what a crock of crap
Seconded
Re: Re: Re:2 what a crock of crap
Thirded
Re: Re: what a crock of crap
Don’t forget to mention how cheap SSD’s are while organizations STILL refuse to pony up the doe for them.
Yes they are more expensive but if calculated the time saved for the employees involved the more expensive hardware would come out cheaper.
Time is money folks, get the good shit or you have to wait for your shit.
When I first saw ‘supermemcomputer” for a moment I thought ‘super-meme-computer’.