• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Carbon Nanotube chips on the way

RAMA

Admiral
Admiral
Pretty much on schedule for the next paradigm in computing to keep Moore's law going.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/t...utm_medium=pbsofficial&utm_campaign=nova_next

Part of a $3 BILLION investment by IBM in order to jump-start research.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3051769/...d-chips-can-break-through-limits-of-moores-la

"This breakthrough demonstrates the technology can scale," enabling ever-smaller chip components, said Shu-Jen Han, a materials scientist at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center, headquartered in Yorktown Heights, New York. "And we believe it can happen in the decade, sooner than the industry thinks."
 
That wouldn't actually be a paradigm shift. It's the exact same paradigm with a slightly faster microprocessor.

A "paradigm shift" would bring Moore's law to an end and lead to a period of growth and development in some other aspect of performance. For example, if somebody develops a new kind of peizoelectric actuator that allows for cheap and efficient consumer robotics, we might enter an era where nearly ALL computers are at least partially mobile; the new paradigm would involve computers getting progressively more agile and more humanlike even if their overall computing power never actually changes.
 
^ something like that.

Actually, I expect the next true paradigm will come in the form of nonelectronic or semi-electronic logic systems. The whole thing about digital computers is that we're using electrical voltage across transistors for all these processes; we forget that a lot of the early computers were actually mechanical in nature, using combinations of cams, gears, leavers and disks for processing activities. With nanotechnology, you could actually create mechanical components and gears the size of bacteria that could function like clockwork mechanisms; a logic gate might be rotated open or closed like an actual physical circuit and then stay that way until an electrical signal switches its modes. Eventually, electrical signals might be replaced by optical signals and/or even by chemical signals. Either would result in a computer that processes data like an organism but still manages to output data like a consumer device; you could have microprocessors powered entirely by sunlight, logic boards that can be upgraded to new standards by downloading a software patch and then dipping your computer in sugar water. Such a paradigm wouldn't require computers to become faster or smarter, just more adaptable and more scalable to the task at hand. You wouldn't see exponential growth, but exponential grow-ability; the only change would be the speed with which a computer can be reconfigured and the limits to which it can be modified in a short period of time.
 

tumblr_md1bdbcV9G1r7cgw7o1_250_zpsjwtjnec4.gif

Summarize, dude.:borg:
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top