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Intel Looks to Billion-Transistor Processors
Weedstock writes: "EE Times has an article about Intel's next decade roadmap. It explains what are the current issues with the actual "plastic bumped organic land grid array" packaging technology and how it will be modified into a "bumpless package with built-up layers" to accomodate billion-transistor processors."
"Bumped to bumpless"?!? Whoopee f'n doo! They say that the wire widths will get smaller (no shit!), and lithography will get better (again, no shit!). Besides that, they don't really address how they will package a billion transistors (meaning chip interconnects). A fifty fold increase will mean at least a 10 fold increase in interconnects. But at least there are no bumps! ;-)
Oh, and a new "unidentified" gate oxide- yeah, and I have a new superconductor that is also unidentified.
Next, they talk about silicon-on-insulator (SOI) tech. Ah, IBM already is using this!
This "article" says zilch, and in some parts mentions year old tech as new stuff. By the way, Apple is looking to a trillion transistor processor with a warp drive and heisenburg compensators (this is a joke, for you clueless ones).
All in all, Michael needs to actually learn about technology before he starts posting garbage about supposed "new" tech.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Who needs a BILLION transistors in a processor, for crying out loud?! Let me tell you something. A slow 4- or 8-bit processor can execute amazing things when coded correctly. Embedded developers have interfaced these processors to memory, hard drives, CD-ROMs, the ISA and PCI busses, and just about every kind of peripheral out there. I'm beginning to think that a fully functional and FAST computer can be built with NO x86 processor, but with about $20.00 (US) worth of these cheap, slow and small processors. It's the software that needs to be engineered correctly, and I'm afraid that nearly all software out there isn't.
What happened to the good ol' days when programmers--real programmers--wrote very clever, small and fast programs? When it had to be written correctly or it didn't work?
Try explaining to me why nearly all hardware needs to be engineered correctly, for a minimum of components and a maximum of performance, yet nearly all software is slopped together, taking up tens or hundreds of megs and running noticeably slow on today's powerhouse machines. You know what? There's no excuse.
I've seen a hard real time operating system coded in 700 words. I've seen processors with 128 bytes of RAM control industrial robotics. Speaking of industrial stuff, I've seen an automation system that packs a real time operating system, high speed communication, interactive user interface (including full control of the display hardware), and all the automation software... in 20 kilobytes. Seeing this, I cannot understand why something simple like a word processor program should be several megs in size (and why it should hog a ton of memory).
So back to the billion transistors question... why? Why should the processor have to predict the next mess of instructions, load them into a cache, find out it predicted incorrectly, dump the cache, find the correct location, load the instructions... Why are processors marketed by their internal clock speed when they spend most of their time waiting for data? And above all, why does software suck so badly?
OH WELL.
The Lord of the Rings. The book rocks. The movie sucks. Yeah, it SUCKS! I left the theater halfway through it. It SUCKS! But the book is awesome.
OH WELL.