Slashdot Mirror
Cringley: Chip Manufacturing To Radically Change
eshefer writes "
This week cringely talks about a company called rolltronics which he claims will make the current microprocessor fabrication on silicon wafers technology defunct in five years. The company uses roll-to-roll printing on plastic (somewhat like newspaper printing presses) making the process much cheaper to produce then current technologies. "
Why do you need 1 CPU clocked at 1 GHz... if you can have 1000 CPUs clocked at 1 megahertz?
Think about it. Ever heard of the 'connection machine'? Web printing of CPUs at unprecedentedly low costs is a situation that _begs_ for massively parallel computing.
Suppose you could print up a big screen and behind every pixel is a 1 megahertz computer? Let's see- let's imagine the screen is three feet high and... well, any length, right? Make it as wide as your room. Call it 30 dpi and assume you're viewing it from a fair distance. That's 1080x4320 pixels (or so) for 3x12 feet. If each pixel's running a computer at about 1 megahertz that's more than four thousand gigahertz of CPU ;) _and_ you can paper your wall with it.
Yes, getting _information_ to those clever pixels would be the trick, but it's not an insuperable problem. The CPUs can be pretty smart at one megahertz. Give them a few K of ram too, think of them as like a peculiar sort of 'accelerator card' only massively parallel. It's absolutely trivial to do hacks like Asimov's 'Prime Radiant': you'd just have each 'pixel' an alphanumeric generator able to consult an overall RAM location, a pointer to where in RAM to look, and with a brightness control connected to some gaze direction sensor. Presto, wall full of text that scrolls and becomes clearer and follows your gaze- and that is one of the _easiest_ things to do with this stuff.
Better to ask whether you could have a suitcase-sized block with several terabytes of _really_ _slow_ RAM (read: way faster than a HD, and impact proof!), for the cost of a floppy drive- after all, it's only a matter of printing more pages, right? Just keep piling up the 'slow RAM' pages. The same thing could be done as read-only: if you're OK with text, you could have a 'book' (i.e. an object with a screen on it) that is ANY book you like, with terabytes of data in it, printed so cheaply as to be virtually disposable. Look around at your books and ask yourself how much it'd cost you to have a _scribe_ write those out for you ;)
Ask whether the massively parallel 'screen' concept could be used for video game systems (imagine unrolling a wall-sized Quake, or flight sim- even if the quality is not ultra refined, some aspects of it would be as advanced over the current state of the art as the current state of the art is over software rendering- for instance, perhaps you'd have only solid colored triangles BUT the system would build them itself, being fed only very high level object information- and you'd get 100X or 100,000X the model geometric detail you can have today, because each pixel only 'sees' a couple triangles directly behind it and decides only what color it's going to be. So you wouldn't get 3Dfx motion blur but you'd get every leaf on every tree in the forest, as each pixel handles its own (emergent) geometry. Even if you only had Atari 2600 level pixel sophistication- think of the resolution! You could have new games designed to take advantage of that- like, I dunno, a Pac-Man that has just the one maze but it's the size of the wall :)
Or, each pixel knows how to do MPEG transforms- so you unroll a videophone or movie screen the size of your wall. Power's an issue, but if you can get wide enough traces... like a foot wide... a lot of power dissipation issues become less of a problem :) really, the idea has loads of possibilities that don't require heavy centralised processing.
Absolutely. 300 dot _line_ _screen_ is high for mass printing: maybe that's what Shotgun's thinking. Besides, I bet a lot of the action's going to be in large format- doing stuff with wall-sized screens, or medium-res displays that are 2' tall and 6' wide and curve all around the back of your desk. With surface area like that who needs super high resolution? Big screens are cool :)
I could see similar uses in things like scanning, where you're dealing with a lot of parallel data anyhow. You could print some sort of processor that gets rolled up and stuck to the scanner's sensor bar, that interpolates and sharpens and does all sorts of nice image enhancements very cheaply- and have the scan go much faster than current models do. Output bandwidth would be the bottleneck- unless the rolled-up processor also encoded the result into JPEG for you :)
Not sure this technology will take off, anyone remember bubble memory or any of a dozen other pieces of technology set to take over the world? But it could, and through the same process that personal computers blew away minicomputers. Originally, personal computers were crap compared to minis. Slower, less reliable, less functional, you name it. Anyone who wanted to replace their minis with a bunch of PCs would have been looked at as insane. Now these days, people run very powerful and sophisticated software that mini's used to do on their PCs and now you have SETI using all that networked power to do supercomputer work.
If they get this technology to actually work commercially, it could destroy conventional chipmaking techniques. Sure, these things will be slower than normal chips. However as the book _Innovator's Dilemma_ clearly states, what usually happens is that this technology will end up filling a new niche on the low end. Take embedded systems. This plastic technology is a natural fit for that sort of thing. Sure, its slower but most embedded systems are not CPU hogs anyway, and the lower cost and higher production rates outweigh the disadvantages of the reduced processor speed. The manufacturers of this technology work on refining the density of the circuity they're printing on the plastic, improving performance. Slowly they start eroding at the conventional chip technology market from the bottom up. Chip makers keep giving up the low end as they focus on the high end.
The problem is you can't keep doing that forever. Sooner or later you run out of ground. So in a few decades, you might find that for everything but the luxury high performance end of things, all your circuits are printed plastic instead of etched silicon. That's how companies can get burned going with the "sure" technology and get blasted out of the market from below. The low end inevitabily eats up into the high end with cheap technology improvements.
Not that I'm saying this is going to happen. A lot depends on whether they can make this work commercially and how well the technology scales. But it could happen. Don't go dismissing it out of hand. The smart answer is 'wait and see'.
err...
... :-)
s/Why/Who/
Well atleast this crack smoking junkey corrected his mistakes
Palin...
1-Why is the crack smoking junkey who put that website together?
2- Anita Borg, Ph.D. -- Product Innovation and Social Responsibility. Hehe. I just think it's too funny.
Palin...
It would be worth considering that should this scenario come true, it would have an interesting impact on the usages of free-vs-commercial operating systems. If the computer costs $15 to make, people are not going to be spending $80-$100 to put Windows Whatever on it.
.NET and similiar network-based hosting/application providers as a place to store data and applications on, with the $15 computers being treated as more of an access device than a computer -- the catch would be whether or not the monthly service charges or what have you over the long term were cheaper than buying a 'real'/non-disposable computer with software or not.
On the flip side, if the computers are 'disposable', then this might drive up interest in MS
At least you clicked on the link and learnt something, which is more than the dumbass moderator who thinks the post is ''offtopic''
Ball Semiconductor have at least as interesting a plan to deposit semiconductors on small spherical surfaces. They have some small gates working already.
Posts warning that their parent contains a disguised disgusting link may qualify as "off-topic" (though there are better uses for your mod points), but in no way is it fair or accurate to label them as "trolls".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I want to know if it rubs off on my hands.
But human perception, in general, with respect to the number of pieces of information it can juggle at once, or the "gain" of a sensory organ, is restricted to only a few orders of magnitude, and in some instances only one order, so we percieve apparent "knees" in exponential phenomena. Preception of acoustic intensity is a classic example.
Context can also impose a frame of reference on an exponential effect. I'd like to elaborate but the boss just walked in...
I can see the fnords!
And it just may BE your shirt pocket. That's what Cringley probably knows but isn't saying - When it becomes that cheap to just "print" a computer, they'll be integrated into everything: refrigerators, automobiles, clothing, furniture, you name it. Sure, there will still be information appliances, but their purpose will evolve into enabling your coordination of all the other computers you will interact with throughout your day, from your own household accoutrements to public infrastructure to your employer and the internet at large.
It is going to make the world unrecognizeable.
Again.
And the amount of information that will need to be exchanged is going to make today's bandwidths look like trickles. Right now, we are at the knee of the exponential growth curve of the telecommunications market, and technology will keep up with demand as improvments in optical swithcing continue. Communication service is going to become more important than banking - hell, banking and finance has already become little more than information flowing around a network.
You want to be a part of it? Forget putting your money in the people who make computers. Invest in telecommunications, and the hardware that supports it. That's where the fortunes are going to be made.
I can see the fnords!
These are just areas where we will see the incremental improvement that Cringley described.
Hell, in 1988, when I bought my first CD player, the hard drive couldn't store even one track from a CD. Now my hard drive holds dozens of ripped CDs, in many cases uncompressed.
I can see the fnords!
Well, aside from trying to poke holes in your math, there are (at least) two other reasons why these "plastic" computers are going to be a big hit, despite the fact that they're lower on the curve than ones made out of polluted sand: - Cost. The organic materials are much less expensive than the ultrapure materials required to make semiconductors and hard drives. That's why CDs are so cheap. (At least as long as the oil holds out.) - Ubiquity. When you can print a computer on any old visibly clean surface, not just plastic sheets, then you've turned an important corner. You can now put computers into eyeglasses, furniture, windows, coffemakers, even underwear (just imagine!) It doesn't matter how fast the machine once you pass certain computational thresholds: the ability to support a graphic interface, the speed to reproduce audio,and another milestone for video. Each of these thresholds open up yet more applications for embedded computing.
I can see the fnords!
Linux BeOS FreeBSD MacOS X QNX
SUB-20000 USER ID FOR FREE!
-Joe
Yes, because the is a larger lower bound of feature size they are not going to be cranking out 1GHz CPUs on this stuff, especially when the chip is the size of a sheet of paper - it takes electrons time to get from place to place.
So this limits the power of individual processors using this process, but you can go massively parallel, just add another processor page, or 3 or 10...
This may never produce a barnstormer of a computer, but it sounds promising for consumer electronics and web appliances.
-josh
You're thinking in terms of silicon. It's not a straight scale-up when you're changing the basic materials. It's my understanding that a polymer-based CPU of that size would generate less heat and use less power than a silicon-based CPU sized as they currently are.
Rechargeable batteries.
Although the technology fits on a sheet of paper ( what size? ), in theory it should be possible to fold it, or roll it, so it takes less space. Other advantages would include the fact that you could actually place it a wafer of plastic - imagine your desk could actually be made of layers of this technology and you wouldn't even notice, and all you would have to is plug your keyboard in.
Technologies at this stage are often seen by themselves and out of context, but once out of the research stage there is nothing stopping them from being combined with other technologies to increase the number of possible applications.
These sort of technologies are what will help contribute to the invisible technologies - whereby they are there and made use of, but you won't notice them.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
What if someone accidentally rips my laptop? :)
Have you painted a shed today?
Yeah, remember all those press releases about cool new technology that happened eighteen months ago but I can't buy at the store yet? Those all must suck, so they should go ahead and stop developing them.
Science takes time, but it ALWAYS ALWAYS gets results. Project Apollo took, what, a whole 15 years to get people from primitive jet engines to walking on the moon. Who wants to wait that long?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Do you have any idea how much venture capital you could get if you had a credible design for a five year battery for a computer? ANY computer? If you know how to do that, I'll be glad to scare up some financing. Somehow.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
What, you're going to land on that and ignore all the people who say "Here here!" when they should be saying "Hear hear!"
Just like Mr. Simpson says. "It's pronounced noo-kyew-lar."
No, it's not an American thing. I bet there are people in other countries that have bad grammar too...I'm just not good enough (enuff?) at reading their languages to pick it up. And British authors...hell, they think car hoods are called bonnets and cookies are called biscuits! Never mind grey and colour. Or Aluminium (sic). Who can tell what those poofters (weirdos) think is a grammar error?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Regarding your last point, it's interesting that the first computers DID cost $500 million EASILY (depending on how you want to adjust for inflation), but you can get a superb pocket calculator for $15. It's not as far fetched as it might seem on the face of it...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
There's a difference in believing they are going to change the world and imagining what the world would be like if they did. I'm a skeptic myself (good trait for an engineering student), but I also don't mind exploring interesting, even improbable, ideas.
I'm certainly not going to give them any money. : )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Actually, I think in English concepts. "Knight" and "night" are two completely separate entries in my internal lexicon, just like other homonyms such as affect and effect.
Yeah, but you yanks have no honour.
Well, they tried marketing DVD's that expire (DIVX) and look how long that lasted!
I don't doubt that there would be an easy and economical way to recharge/reuse/replace the power cell.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There was an interesting Wired Magazine article that discussed the work being done by Paper Computer to make cheap flat computers.
There was a Slashdot article about these guys over a year ago.
-----
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
Considering how reluctant paper is to disappear down the hole with our lousy 1.5 GPF toilets, I seriously doubt the computer would go anywhere.
GPF=Gallons per Flush
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Great. Now you can have the dog fetch your laptop. I hope that they find a way to prevent it getting soaked at the same time
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
Actually, there are at least two companies. Dieceland Tech Corp is promising a $10 phone, and this Register story says a $20 laptop also. The DTC "future" page has an image of a laptop but no details.
So you're saying that we're not going to see any new technologies because it is rare for a new technology to become mainstream? That's ridiculous - of course we'll be seeing new technologies appear, sooner or later. Sure, most fail, but not all of them.
"Than" and "then" sound very different when spoken in a good old South African accent. In general though I don't have that problem at all, I've never had much of a problem with spelling. I think its a genetic thing or something, some (otherwise intelligent) people seem to struggle with spelling. Or maybe it has do with how much a person reads. Reads books, that is, not websites like slashdot.
I don't have all the numbers to fill this in, but here's a try.
The technology is aiming to be available 5 yrs from now (notice how long shots are always 5 yrs out)
The latest generation of microprocessors have around ?20?million transistors. 5yrs will give us 3 more doublings (assuming Moore's Law holds), so will be looking at replicationg 160mil transistors for the processor. 1Gig of Ram, add another billion. All the other circuitry, lets just make it simple and say that an average computer will have 1.5billion transistors in 2005.
A magazine has around 200 pages. So each page of this computer will have to hold something like 7.5million transistors (assuming an even distribution).
Assuming they can print at 300dpi (which I believe is high for mass printing) on 8inx11in media gives
300x8x300x11 = 7.92 million
This may look like it will pass until you consider that a transistor will take more than a pixel and then consider inter-transistor wiring. If this is enough they will barely be cutting the edge unless:
-they can print at higher resolution
-they can print more pages
I don't see the need anyway. Computers are cheap now. You can get one for $100. What's expensive are the latest processors, and they're not expensive because of production cost. It's recapturing the engineering cost that drives up the price. This will only produce $15 computers if someone is willing to pay $500million for the first one.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Can you say "use conducting (as opposed to semiconducting) plastics for the interconnects"?
Bob is often interesting and always entertaining.
I think, however, he missed the boat on this one. In an age where Geometries are shrinking by orders of ten, twenty or even a hundred, it is not inconcieveable that five years from now they will be talking about mass producing chips where their geometries are approaching the size of atoms.
The reason the printing press didn't change very much in three hundred years was because the people who sold it didn't have to worry about some guy down the street coming out with a better, simpler model. Intel and AMD do. I believe Bob is right when he talks about this company making something revelutionary, but I would bet money that these people are twenty years too late.
Beware the wood elf!!!
Advantages:
Drawbacks
A often-quoted great app is the head-up display for cars: a transparent set of electonic circuits that you glue on your windshield and contains its own display. UV protection films are mandatory for keeping the circuits from burning in the summer, but it looks feasable and cheaper than the usual optical projection solutions.
Don't sell that $12 million 193-nm optical stepper in your silicon fab, though. We're not there yet, especially for medium or high speed circuits.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I dunno that the feature size is that much of a killer. I think we can claw back the low-clock rate by massive integration.
There's a lot of inefficiency inherent in the modular assembly process exemplified by your run-of-the-mill laptop. The processor talks to memory over a small bus, the hard-drive knows little of what will be requested next...
This is all the case because traditional manufacuring needs to modularise in order to acheive high enough yeilds to be price-effective. Hence each component needs to be a fast as possible (thus the smaller feature size) to achieve acceptable performance.
If the entire logic circuit of the laptop could be printed in one go -- Extrelemely Large Scale Integrationed -- I'd imagine that we could compensate for the lower clock speed by exploiting paralellism and asycn clocking. Instead of printing only one CPU, print ten, each with their own memory. Give 'em a nice wide bus to communicate...
Of course, no-one said that designing or programming this beast would be easy.
If this is true, then that's a lot of cheap computers, that are going to need an operating system. One that's already demonstrated an ability to be easily ported to lots of architectures. This could be a big win for Linux.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Think more along the lines of magazine presses which are less likely to exhibit flaws (in my experience). The production of newspapers is done with less concern about details - as long as the thing is basically readable, no one's going to complain about a $.50 paper and the newspaper presses know this. As the circulation goes down and cost of issue goes up, people are more likely to complain. In this case, the circulation is going to be extremely low - everyone isn't going to be buying a computer every day, week, or month. The company would naturally have to make sure that this roll process is accurate enough that they can limit the number of misprinted computers to an amount that can be recovered by profits without a problem.
I rent DVDs for $5, when with DIVX I could have "purchased" the physical item. Besides the convience of having it closer for more replays (paying the $5 again), or being able to buy it for life ($20), I have nothing when I return it to Blockbuster. And late fees? Pfft.
And what would have made DIVX even more tempting if it caught on was the opportunity to hack the player to play "expired" disks.
So what I'm saying here is.. I don't know what I'm saying. In DIVX it's a good idea, because a video disk is an item you'd perhaps rent. But for a computer? I like my comptuers big, grey, and power hungry. I'm barely sold on the concept of batteries, let alone in computers.
-bugg
-
All the memory and drive electronics for a solid state TV screen, with an OLED layer for the light emitters. Cheap flat panel TV to hang on your wall!
-
Screen, touch pad, memory and slow processor for something like a Palm. Make it 3"x5" and then mount the quarter-inch-thick result in a bit of hard plastic housing for durability. Cheap digital assistant!
-
Same as the last one with an IR transmitter and receiver. Cheap teachable universal remote!
The comments about the cost of the OS and other software for these gizmos raise interesting questions about what the total cost might be.On the other hand there's a whole range of electronics out there where this sort of density is not an issue and this could make a lot of older fabs that are building this stuff redundant.
I could imagine a cool disk drive replacement with this technology - basicly a pile of mylar sheets - I bet you could get comparable densities at similar prices .... and you wouldn't have to spin them ....
Nowhere in Cringley's article is there any discussion of the performance penalty that this process would entail. Let's assume we want to duplicate the equivalent of 50 million transistors clocked at 1 GHz. Right now Intel can squeeze that many components on a 200 square millimeter die by using a CMOS process with a 0.18 micron feature size.
Now assume that your printing process needs transistors with 10 micron feature sizes to ensure proper registration and a high enough yield to be manufacturable. That increases your effective "die" to 956 square inches. (Area increases with the square of feature size.) That's equivalent to 10 sheets of single-sided paper.
For a multi-layer printing process, 10 layers of plastic sandwiched together would definitely be possible. HOWEVER - you are not going to be able to clock your circuit at 1 GHz! Because of the much larger size (and capacitance) of your circuit, you'll do well to get a 1 MHz clock speed (1000X slower).
While this process may be very useful for e-books, displays, etc., I don't see how any high-performance computing could be done with a microprocessor constructed with this technique. Your only alternative to slower clock speeds would be massive parallelism to achieve higher computational throughput. Assuming a direct tradeoff of speed versus number of transistors, you would need 10000 layers instead of 10 layers in your process. There goes your low manufacturing cost.
It's not just enough for a computer to be cheap. It's got to be fast, or it's no good to anyone.
-Daniel
Those all must suck, so they should go ahead and stop developing them.
My intention on the original post was not to speak against scientific research (I am a scientist at Stanford University). My intention was to warn against the folly of believing that just because they have a company with cool press releases that they are going to change the world. As a scientific undertaking I'm all for it, as a business opportunity, I'm skeptical.
(Jeez, you guys are harsh)
-Moondog
Sounds like we've been through this path before. Unfortunately, developing new technologies rarely works and just because there is a company dedicated to it doesn't mean much more. Remember 3d protein memory based on lasers and rhodopsin? I'll believe it when I see it.
-Moondog
-----
Our microprocessor isn't some tiny silicon die -- it's the size of a sheet of paper, maybe two
-----
Where to start? The circuit size will drive up power usage and heat generation. The only way to offset this will be to slow the processor, and to add a huge battery. The result will be one of the biggest and heaviest "laptop" systems on the market that's slower than a P-100 and able to heat an average 3-bedroom house all by itself.
Although this technology has the possibility to make manufacturing chips much cheaper, Cringly doesn't mention anything about designing them.
How much of the current price of a chip goes into R&D? Half or more?
Now, granted, producing more chips does allow the cost of R&D to be distributed to more costomers, but the idead of a $15 computer seems absurd. You can only distribute the cost to so many poeple. (Most of the first world already supports it, and who else can afford it?)
I hope this technology works, but it's more likely to be an evolution than a revolution.
If computers only cost $15 to manufacture, that will mean Windows will be over 3x more expensive than the computer itself.
The masses will finally start taking free software seriously.
I'm aware of the argument that the purpose of writing is communcation, and if the message is understood then the rest is unimportant. It seems to me that attitude is akin to a programmer hacking something together until it compiles and appears to work, and considering it a job well done.
Try printing something that's 15 atoms across....
Try aligning your printing presses to that kind of close tolerances....
Try doing multi-layers with this thing...
Sure, it might work, but I doubt it.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
It can't be too hard to wire another battery to it, just solder 2 points together and bypass the dead batter.
Well, if we get real simplistic and ignore the timing of operations, the distance across a page would only limit the CPU to something like 14.9GHz. Then again, you could get fancy with the layout, and if you consider the layering, you can keep some key parts of the CPU within less than 1/4 inch from each other.
Anybody who says these things would replace current technology as speed/power leaders any time soon is smoking crack, but I would certainly pay $15 for a 486DX66 laptop.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Nachos are much better.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
At least DVD's don't expire.
... yet. See: Self-Destructing DVDs: Son of DIVX
Why is it that I so frequently see the (mis)use of then instead of than.
Too werds: fonetik spelers.
So before you go dismissing this technology, try checking out what they're really trying to do with it instead of buying the Cringely article.. which seems a bit on the sensationalist journalist side.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I can see the headline now:
Hack your AOL Spamputer to run Linux 6.4!
If you thought those AOL CD's were bad, imagine getting pre-configured computers in the mail. If it's cheap enough, it'll happen.
Here's a Google cache from the rolltronics site: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.rolltroni cs.com/Roll2roll.htm. I'm sure Google can handle the traffic much better than the original seems to be holding up...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Wouldn't the length of traces eventually represent a problem? We're already running into 'speed of electrons' problems with current designs, wouldn't an 8" CPU only magnify the problem, and create a speed limitation?
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Or, even if it's not rechargeable, by the time a 5-year lithium battery runs out, you're probably ready for a new $15 computer.
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
What happens when the wafers get all crinkeled up like my newspapers?
something which doesn't require much processing power, but DOES require flexibility and low cost to succeed... Digital books, which we've been hearing about being right around the corner for frickin' ever (but are never good enough to really catch on) have been waiting for this sort of technology.
But seriously, if it can't run half-life, it ain't replacing my note book.
What he was saying (with the whole Longbow/rifle analogy) was that, while the technology may seem to be inadequate/kludgy now, it may not be in the future.
AFA all the 'it won't compete with a X Ghz processor' has it occured to anybody that you print the pages for the supportable stuff (battery/display) and all 100 pages have a notch dead center where a real processor is dropped JUUUST before you laminate on the keyboard?
So then you HAVE your 1 Ghz, $40 laptop.
I also think it depends somewhat on how your mind works. For example, I read a lot, and I tend to 'see' words, rather than hear them. Perhaps that is why, when I was younger, I used to know what a lot of words meant, and how to spell them, but I would sometimes have, uh, interesting pronunciation of some words.
-----
Enough is enough I say! Bring back the 'a' in than!
------
I agree that this could be bad in a situation like this, borderline terrible, in fact. However, a disposable computer, like a disposable camera, can also be a good thing. Imagine losing your laptop when the airline loses your luggage (I know, Real Geeks take their laptops as carry-ons, but I digress). Now imagine picking up a Laptopzine at the airport shop for $50 that'll let you communicate with your company while you're on your trip waiting for your claim with the airline to go through. At the end of your trip, all you have to do is recycle your laptop. You've got less little lost productivity, and an interesting toy to play with for a little while.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Do you know how they make Hawaiian shirts?
Printable == Wearable
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Translation or original Old English is up to you.
This I like.
Just another example that moderators should not have a glass crack pipe within arms reach when moderating...
But seriously folks, a hard drive with no moving parts would be great. No moving parts = less of a chance for hard drive failure.
-----
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
surely you don't all think that the then/than is accidental? umm.. in the couple short years i've been slashdotting, taco and hemos have nearly always written "better then you". /. miscreants are most interested in the bashing opportunities presented by these common, alternate usages, it seems strangely thick-headed for you all not to realize that your trolling only pisses of the few people who bother to read your sub-thread -- but malda&bates can send a great big "screw you, i get to do what i want while you childishly whine about it on my board. whatever, losers" to thousands of people in one quick stroke.
and people have always posted bitching about it.
you think they never once actually had any idea that the two were spelled differently?
since
either that, or they just don't care. do a thought experiment: you oversee a public message board, you post stories you find interesting and 300k+ people read them and scream at each other as if their opinions mattered. plus all the normal booger-picking, car-washing, grocery-buying day-to-day stuff most everybody does ---- and then somehow you're supposed to care about the "literary sensitivities" of a handful of people who have nothing better to do than lurk the www searching for mis-spellings that they pretend are Threatening All Life As We Know It?!?
of course, since most are doing that whole post-post-post-postmodern, anonymous, blowing off steam, i-like-to-think-of-it-as-public-performance-art, whatdya whatdya in posting this kind of picky crap anyway, you already DO know that nobody cares about you and your opinions, and it's precisely these feelings of futile, impotent anger that cause you to act as you do in the first place.
in any case, your compulsive internal wondering "did anyone see my post yet and get angry and reply and oh! any attention is better than none pleez validate my feeeeeelings" post-refresh post-refresh post-refresh runs up more traffic and pageviews for the very people you think you're bringing down. meanwhile, they're logging your IP, pursuing their personal hobbies with revenue generate by your lameness, and laughing.
get it?? basically, what taco/hemos are saying to you, daily, is something you understand very well: YHBT. YHL. HAFND.
---
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
And the old-line companies like Intel and AMD, which are currently fighting over which is the superior obsolete semiconductor company, well, those outfits go out of business
Bzzzt Wrong.
Intel or AMD BUYS our friendly RollTronics and maintain their positions in the new era --or-- they get involved enough in the technology and prove that it, in fact, does not work (in order to protect their $XXX Trillion dollar fab investments)
About five years ago I read about a team at a (IIRC) Glasgow Uni who were printing flexible LED's onto PET (ie. drinks bottle plastic).
This might be a good way to make large LED displays.
STOP THE PRESSES! Sorry that had to be said :)
If you're ever stuck in a bathroom stall that's "empty" you'll have to severely double check the piece of scrap paper you use... you might be tossing/flushing your laptop by mistake.
What a concept.
Imagine sending THAT back to tech support for repair: "Reason for repair:" Euhh..... "Curry Related Emergency?"
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
While I'm with Cringely on most of what he says in the article, the 15th Century longbow/arquebus (they didn't have muskets then, damn it!) comparison is a poor one. Essentially, firearms underperformed the longbow right up until the middle of the nineteenth century when breech-loading and mass-produced rifles made them faster and more accurate (hand-built muzzleloaders were slow and inconsistent) than the bow.
The reason that firearms replaced the bow some three hundred years before they were its technical equal was economic: an archer required years of training to have the accuracy and muscle development required to be any use at all in combat (archers can be identified from their skeletons, having asymmetric bone thickening in their arm bones) and have to be fit and well on the day as the physical effort required to discharge thirty arrows rapidly is huge.
A muzzle-loading musket, despite having a 2-metre circle of probable hit at fifty metres range and a rate of fire perhaps a tenth that of a longbow, has a *way* lower ammo cost, a training overhead of perhaps a fortnight (and you can teach it in an afternoon if your student is bright and you don't care if he hits anything), and no great strength or stamina required since the kinetic energy that does the damage doesn't come from the soldier's own muscle.
The solution to the technical difficulties is to use them en masse, mix them with pikes or give them bayonets for close work and fight on the defensive if at all you can.
Basically, the longbow was betamax to the musket's VHS...
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
I suspect that the most important use of a technology like this will be to produce flat screen displays - driving the current high cost of HDTV and flat screen monitors way down.
Yeah, fuck it. Let's just stop all research, and declare that humanity has reached the pinnacle of all possible knowledge.
Isn't this what pinch hitters are for?
Yes, developing new technologies rarely works. That is why we are still in the Stone Age.
Why is it everyday I'm reading about inventions that are going to "revolutionize" an industry? You can make whatever predictions you'd like, if you are a well respected expert people may even listen to you. The fact is that the "next big thing" often is NOT. All new inventions hit snags. While I am sure there is a demand for a $15 laptop, even if it is quite a bit slower by todays standards, they are likely to cost much more at first. If the don't catch on quickly, they aren't going to get cheaper, and this company is likely to go out of buisness. After which other companies will be unlikely to embrace the new technology. Although I would like to see an idea like this succeed, I'll beleive it when I see it.
Angry Penguins practice UltraViolent Lithography! The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
I did. I also said "NOT METAL" I have yet to find a plastic conductor with resistance anywhere as low as aluminum. This in the chip industry is death to high speed. IBM, INTEL, and AMD all are going to copper interconnects in CPU's for one reason - SPEED. Plastic conductors are OK for low speed applications such as membrane (mechanical) switches (keyboards & remotes) and connecting to some displays (LCD and other low speed low current displays) but don't expect them in anything high speed. I also don't expect high density with these. There will be no sub micron chips with it.
The truth shall set you free!
Last time I checked, most plastics have a large thermal expansion factor. Most modern CPU's have 5 or 6 metal layers of lines to connect things together. Materials are carefully chosen so the silicon, Inter Layer Dielectric, interconnects, and packaging all expand about the same. Can you say thermal cycling and stress crack failure? Actualy I see this technology being useful in something needing less than 3 connect layers that are not metal (limiting speed due to resistance) like an Active LCD or full color LED display. I wonder if they can make color LED's with this stuff. A large bright color display you could roll out on the wall in the confrence room would be neat.
The truth shall set you free!
You don't think english as written, but in sounds. It often happens you write a word in a different spelling, but the same sounds. Can't recall right now for which words it happens to me, but for example knights(nights), too(two)
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Isn't Coppermine just a marketing gimmick from Intel? I think the dude meant copper interconnect.
|This space for rent|
There's a specific amount of chips that don't make it due to being defective right off the wafer. Wouldn't this process increase the percentage of defective chips?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Web presses != WWW
comeon, READ! the guy is talking about newspapers!
This sig is intentionally left blank
Cringley says that the battery will be intergrated into the stamping procedure. This could be _really_ bad in my opinion becuase once the battery runs out so would the "computer".
Lets say you pay for this month's Wired and comes via a wafer-computer. You read it and enjoy the interactive articles and eyecandy. Life seems that much cooler.
Next month you want to re-read that artice. Too bad the battery is dead. Now you gotta pay for last months issue again.
This seem like too much control over content I paid for. We are already bitching about DVD region encoding. At least DVD's don't expire.
Leknor
Smart toilet paper! How many transistors can fit on double quilted Charmin?
and if you look at the quality of newsprint and how much the newspaper costs, it's no wonder that they don't charge more than 50 cents for most daily papers...
I want my processor to actually have functioning intricate fine detail, not offset printing...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I know where e-machines will be buying their motherboards now. Sounds hokey to me.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
I'm sure when you can buy a machine that can do a couple million mips for $20 ubiquity will result but the number of transistors and raw processing power needed for all the star trek stuff getting them churned out en masse wont help.
yeah i know about parallelism but we still need push Moore's Law some more
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
I don't know about you, but what I want out of computers is true immersion.
Where are the pioneers of neuron to transistor couplings? These are the people to watch.
Plug in at hitachi biotech- watch out for that AI, wintermute?
In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
So I can install it on my Ginger.
I'd like to make some amusing, slightly funny comment which relates the printed plastic computer concept to an annoying property of some household consumer item. While I'm at it, I'll throw in something about Linux, and possibly nanotechnology. Okay, fill in the details yourself.
Ah.. but not when you're operating your Ginger in underwater mode. Bandwidth will be severely limited in deep-sea operations.
In the future, you will purchase computers by the roll, and rip one off by the perferated edge to use it surf the web while you're on the stool, then use it to wipe your butt when you're done. You heard it here first.
when do I get my wallpaper PC?
Is this something that they've actually built or are they talking pipe dream? i mean if they want it rolling out in 5 years they'd better atleast have a working prototype or something... also exactly what is this thing going to do/be?
is it a full power laptop? is it going to be a new fancy ten-tablet... like a palm on growth hormones?
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
If some people wish to read something into your words other than what you wrote, where's the harm. Maybe you can even take it as a compliment. You don't have to troll, cause the fish just jump into your boat.
But just so I stay on topic....
This is hardly a new development. When I took my last microelectronics fabrication class way back in '97 printable circuits were an interesting idea looking for an application.
Who wants a somewhat cheaper and much much slower computer? No one. They won't be making anything that's high margin. It's not the first time the managment of an endevour is divested from the reality of it.
They're bucking all the helpful physics. Smaller is better. What kind of feature size can you get with a printing press?
Even a quick look at the facts would tell you to sell your stock, or that venture capitalists will buy them to sell their useful patents.
Best case? If they get their technology well developed, they'll be able to make cheaper circuit boards. Hell their business model seems to be wishful thinking and forming alliances with impossibly huge companies (like Samsung) with little or nothing to offer. But I think I've done enuff ranting....
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
What will these guys do in 5 years when a RAMBUS (the company with a lawyer to engineer ratio of 500 to 1) head lawyer claims that they own all the patents on the microprocessor, and on printing presses and demands royalties?
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
What about our job security? I dont know about you but if grandma can build an enterprise network why is she going to pay for a geek? Travis
I have read so many articles predicting the death of this industry or that technique...the only one I remember being partially right was on about 16 years ago forecasting the birth of fiber optic backbones for telecommunications. And even then, the copper networks are still here, plaguing our ability to get high speed access and video-on-demand. Think about all the predictions we've seen: the PC isn't dead, Windows isn't dead, Unix isn't dead, the internal combustion engine isn't dead, agri-business isn't dead, the world didn't end on Y2K. Doomsayers will go right on predicting the end of this or that...and we'll go right on living. Evolution is as evolution does.
There is no guarantee that the content has been read or understood.
Every age has its own share of P.T. Barnums. This time, it's the journalists. I make it a point not to take columns very seriously when most of the paper is taken up by allusions to history and dramatic self portraits of the author. But you get what you pay for.
As they seem to want to make them out of transparent plastic, wouldn't it be logical to try using photonic transisters rather then electronic ones?
After all, it seems that most of the arguements placed here are conserns about electron lag (the huge distances they have to travel), heat, and power consumption. Photons offer a possible solution to these problems, even if the technology is a ways off. They don't produce much heat, they use less power, and they travel easier.
Another consern is the detail you can get with this press process. I think we may all have the printing press metophor on our brain. I don't think they will be whipping these things off like they do newspapers. There wouldn't really be a need to make hundreds of thousands a day. By slowing down the process you can acchive more detail. For example, look at the deatail your laser printer can produce vs that of newsprint.
-Giggles of Doom
"See Tokyo Tower over there? Go get it for me."
"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."
Products like Zope and Modsnake, as well as propreitry solutions like Allaire's ColdFusion and Vignettes' Story Server, will enable applications to be distributed via networked computers. This will allow current technology to run applications of tommorrow without huge infrastructure upgrades.
The good news is that this method of application development saves time, too. So you can spend time on things you consider more important than application development/information systems - like feeding your polo ponies or brushing their manes, etc etc.Just my 2c
All these guys do is provide a substrate that is impermeable to H2O and air so the polymer FETs don't degrade. Untill now, the only alternative was glass to provide a decent barrier. A page-sized die will probably never yeild a microprocessor because electrons can only travell so far in a clock cycle, and syncronizing pulses across even a P4 die is no simple trick. The real neat trick in this story comes from a compnay called Alien Technology. They make silicon transistors, dissolve the substarte and float them in solution. They then take a plastic roll (I think they work with rolltronics) that has holes for the transitors etched into it by UV exposure. The solution flows over and the little guys stick in the holes. They claim a decent fill rate, probably good enough for displays, and all that remains is to inkjet on the traces to link 'em all together.