HP's Crossbar Latch... Next-Gen Transistor?

moojin writes "CNN.com reports that "in a paper published in Tuesday's Journal of Applied Physics, HP said three members of its Quantum Science Research group propose and demonstrate a "crossbar latch," which provides the signal restoration and inversion required for general computing without the need for transistors.""

Comments

Not Legit

[Illuminati Member]

I work for a team in research at HP. This latch has potential, but it hasn't been fully tested. The PR dept just simply went off and decided to get everyone excited.

Just pray it ends up passing all testing and becoming everything they expect. Otherwise we might end up with an Intel-like pentium division problem on our hands...

Re:Not Legit

[Kupek]

Then how did their work get into the Journal of Applied Physics, which I assume, like all scientific journals, has a rigorous peer review process?

If it works...

[FiReaNGeL]

If it works, would actual cpu-producing factories be able to implement it, or would it require a new process and new fabs to produce?

And they claim impressive (potential) performance gains... do the average computer user really need more than 4 Ghz? Or will the market for this new technology be supercomputer-class computers only?

Discovery? . . . Or Invention.

[eigerface]

If this pans out to be viable, it will be interesting to see if it is promoted as a scientific (i.e. open) discovery, or a patentable (i.e. closed) invention.

The Stock price went up, the Press Release worked.

[Zwack]

Greetings,

I read the Press Release and this "has the potential to"... My guess is that HP are suffering at the moment (AIX machines are cheaper and more powerful than HP-UX ones, guess which we are buying less of) and this Press Release was published as a way of boosting the stock price.

Given that HP are dropping PA-Risc in favour of Itanium and that Intel appear to be dropping Itanium, HP seem to be dropping out of the large Unix market. I am sure that the PC Server market is good to them but surely diversification is the better way to stay competitive? Before anyone suggests it, there are some things that you just can't do as efficiently on lots of little servers that you can do on one larger server. For example distributed databases have locking issues that monolithic ones don't, and some of our legacy applications are still single threaded in parts.

Z.

Re:Can you say "invented"?

[bill_mcgonigle]

that transistors couldn't have been invented the all of a sudden way they were in 1947... and now we're suddenly expected to believe that HP has this kind of working tech?

No, you're logic isn't consistent.

If we've captured an alien craft (I'm not dismissing the possibility) and they were far more advanced than us they would have a somewhat stable technology base.

OK let's run with the possibility: so we study the systems onboard and find out they're using transistors. Now it's 50 years later and we find out they were using cross-bar latches?

If they had cross-bar latch-based systems they wouldn't be have been using transistors in the first place.

Given all the work in nanotech in the past decade if you had to stake a claim you'd be better off saying that we 'stole' transistors than these cross-bar latches. But then we'd be about to have better technology than the Aliens and our European friends still can't land a probe on the nearest planet.

Now what's really interesting is that HP comes out with this days after dissolving their Itaniac partnership with Intel, the pioneers of the transistor.

Don't get rid of your vacuum tubes

[CustomDesigned]

They'll keep working through an EMP that would fry semiconductor electronics. You can reduce the size and MTBF of your glass envelope system by large scale integration of circuitry on the anode. Fewer glass envelopes means fewer failures. Ideally, you could get the whole system in one envelope. Then just keep some spares to replace as needed.

Smelly arse

[Pan T. Hose]

Haven't you ever seen two dogs meeting in the street? The first thing they do is to smell each other's ass. That's because a dog's ass has an absolutely wonderful smell! It must be true, how could a hundred million dogs be wrong?

They are in fact not smelling their arses but their genitals which indeed have an absolutely wonderful smell for dogs just like human genitals have an equally wonderful smell for humans. (Or so I've read.) The anus is being smelled as a side effect and its smell doesn't differ between both sexes so it is not very helpful as a guide to copulation. (Dogs don't usually make anal sex.)