DailyDirt: It's Not Just A Good Idea... It's Moore's Law
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.
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- 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]
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