Slashdot Mirror
A Plasmonic Revolution for Computer Chips?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Today, we're using basically two ways to move data in our computers: transistors carry small amounts of data and are extremely small, while fiber optic cables can carry huge amounts of data, but are much bigger in size. Now, imagine a single technology combining the advantages of photonics and electronics. This Stanford University report says a new technology can do it: plasmonics. (For more about plasmons, read this Wikipedia article.) Theoretically, it is possible to design plasmonic components with the same materials used today by chipmakers, but with frequencies 100,000 times greater than the ones of current microprocessors. There is still a challenge to solve before getting plasmonic chips. Today, plasmons can only travel a few millimeters before dying, while today's chips are typically about a centimeter across. Read this overview for more details and references about plasmonics, and to discover why it's one possible future for chips' circuitry."
But a mirror for links:
Roland Piquepaille writes "Today, we're using basically two ways to move data in our computers: transistors carry small amounts of data and are extremely small, while fiber optic cables can carry huge amounts of data, but are much bigger in size. Now, imagine a single technology combining the advantages of photonics and electronics. This Stanford University report says a new technology can do it: plasmonics. (For more about plasmons, read this Wikipedia article.) Theoretically, it is possible to design plasmonic components with the same materials used today by chipmakers, but with frequencies 100,000 times greater than the ones of current microprocessors. There is still a challenge to solve before getting plasmonic chips. Today, plasmons can only travel a few millimeters before dying, while today's chips are typically about a centimeter across. Read this overview for more details and references about plasmonics, and to discover why it's one possible future for chips' circuitry."
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
A FAT COCK IN YOUR ARSE
Lets keep it simple, put all of the Roland Piquepaille conspiracy posts here. :)
Editors: GIVE HIM HIS OWN DAMN SECTION SO CAN HIDE HIS POSTS
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Let us think of a computer processing unit as a juggler, and bytes as mangoes. Older CPUs would juggle one mango at a time, and frequently require modifications to the stage to boot. Around the 1980s, they could juggle two mangoes. Then four around 1990, and today as many as eight at a time! Now you would be expected to be quite impressed with each leap, notwithstanding the fact that you really wanted a juggler that could handle melons, grapefruit, or watermelon slices instead of (or in addition to) mangoes. In addition, the fact that you are juggling in a zoo where a primate is free to grab your fruit and substitute twigs (or worse!) mid-juggle owing to something called "stack smashing" in computer terminology is not supposed to discourage you.
There is a movement towards something called mutable paragraphs, where as in English "words" (groups of bytes) can be of different lengths depending on need. This may mean the ability to exactly fill out a data page for better efficiency, or to allow the CPU to work with communication protocols in their element (if a common network packet is 68 bytes long, a word should be ½NP or 34 bytes in the I/O buffer.) It also means that you use no more CPU space than you absolutely need to for a computational step, decreasing wear and tear on your components.
I guess what I'm getting at is that science fiction has nothing on practical interative design for real world technological improvement. Sure, we might get to the same place we read about 50 years ago, but not all in one step.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
But they might need to rephase the modulators and run in through some sort of tachion inverter feild.
How much heat are these things going to generate though. Because you know E = hf, if you have 100,000 times the frequency, your going to need to throw in 100,000 times the energy!! Of course that is simplification of what is really happening with these kinds of chips and it is much more complicated then just 100,000 times the energy needed. But it seems like these things might make the Pentium IV seems like a fridge!
Another use for this technology maybe rendering objects invisible to the observer. Using plasmons to stop light from scattering back to the observer's eyes. Unfortunately it can only be used to hide very small objects since the wave lengths of the light need to be near the size of the object that reflecting them.
If anyone wants anymore info on this check out this link.
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Plasmonics does not sound like a perfectly cromulent word. Are you sure that the authors haven't embiggened the word a bit a bit? I mean, it's not unpossible...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
plasmonic repeaters.
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money. Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at Network Solutions ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network Solutions cost $34.99 per year, or about $3 per month. This leaves Roland Piquepaille with $647 each month. He may pay for additional services related to his online journal, but I was unable to find any evidence of this.
All of the above are cold, hard, verifiable facts, except where st
"Plasmons are generated when, under the right conditions, light strikes a metal. The electric field of the light jiggles the electrons in the metal to the light's frequency, setting off density waves of electrons." Sounds to me like "plasmons" is just a different way of saying "electromagnetic radiation". Its just at different frequencies than visible light (x-rays, gamma rays, radio, etc.) Or maybe I am confusing waves of photons with waves of electrons. But then what is the difference between plasmons and regular, good old-fashioned-Ben-Franklin-zapping electricity?
Quoted for redundancy.
Today, plasmons can only travel a few millimeters before dying, while today's chips are typically about a centimeter across.
Well, in that case, it sounds similar to my research. See, if you jump, you can fly. Now currently, I can only fly a foot or two. Of course, most people want to fly longer distances, but it's a start.
-Valiss
...more like Pisspie am I rite
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144963 &cid=12138429
Didn't the Plasmonics tour with the Dead Kennedys in the 1980s?
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
I know next to nothing about this field but wonder if it would be possible to bridge the gap in distance using using metal or ceramic nano-wires embedded on-chip for the plasmons to travel across?
Wikipedia, because the tyranny of the persistant must be right.
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money. Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at Network Solutions ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network Solutions cost $34.99 per year, or about $3 per month. This leaves Roland Piquepaille with $647 each month. He may pay for additional services related to his online journal, but I was unable to find any evidence of this.
All of the above are cold, hard, verifiable facts, except where st
Wasn't that a Punk Rock Band from the 80's with Wendy O'Williams?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
All cromulance aside the embignation of the issue is not important as its dohlarity is blogular and it becomes cromulant.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
If you're wondering why all this fuss about the Roland Piquepaille problem, check out the rpiquepa's Recently Accepted Submissions.
6 articles were submitted in the last month, NONE were rejected. If there were any Rejected articles, they would be displayed under a "Recent Submissions" section.
What are the chances that the Slashdot editors accept 100% of Roland's submissions, when they reject the majority of submissions from other people.
When was the last time YOU had a story accepted by the Slashdot crew?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
... is making semiconductors???
Oh, plasMONICS... my bad...
(I know, I know: she's deceased)
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
bullshit.
And WOW was a piece of work, for sure.
"He worked at Plasmonics Institute, just an engineer in a sealed white suit... he did a good job in the computer race, but his bosses didn't like him so they shot him into space!"
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Claiming "100,000 times the frequency" is a little misleading. You're not talking about the processor running at terahertz speeds - simply put, you can't make things small enough to do that. Plasmonic signals, photonic signals, electronic signals - they all travel on the order of light speed. There really wouldn't be much point raising the clock frequency beyond the characteristic length of the processing unit (Pentium 4 designers understand this now - they had to put "drive" stages into the pipeline just to allow signals to propagate, and that deep pipeline lead to a very low IPC).
This would be useful for things like memory and processor interconnects, because you could shove gigantic amounts of data. Hence the reason that the article stresses their use as high-traffic freeways. I'm not sure I see the point in an all-plasmonic chip (unless they've got power advantages) because of size concerns.
Why would we hide his posts?
Because, the articles come from Roland as if he was just another Slashdot user, which then gives more credibility to the submission [1].
In reality, it's quite clear that there is some sort of business connection between Roland and Slashdot. There is no other reason to accept 100% of Roland's submissions.
It's a desceptive relationship.
[1] Except that the credibility is undermined by the constant complaining of the Slashdot readers.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I think they played backup for the exploited also..
FC--
Behind a nanoscopic plasmonic shield oscillating at rotating frequencies.
And yes, you alien Lords of the Nanobuts, I'll shut up now.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Sitting in a tree
Kay Eye Ess Ess Eye En Gee
I don't know about your computer, but my computer uses wires to move data and transistors to process said data. I don't see how one can compare transistors to fiber optic cables.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
And if Intel makes a dual core plasmonics processor it will be called the Extreme Plasmonics SUX-2000. Or something like that.
For the record, I e-mailed CmdrTaco a while back on this. He dismissed it and said Roland's articles get accepted because he must be writing good submissions, and that the editors don't look at the name of the submitter when accepting stories. He said the conspiracy theories and complaints are a "new successful troll meme."
It's rather hard to ignore the evidence though. As you said, all six articles last month were accepted. That's 100%. I bet there is no other user on Slashdot with 100% accepted stories an entire month. Only Roland.
The right to die is a personal choice, not a place for Republican grandstanding.
How do you know she wanted to die? Oh, you took the husband's word for it even though a court said there was a dispute. "My wife said she wanted to die!" is good enough documentation for you. Fuck the family's wishes.
You know, there were plenty of liberals and Democrats who didn't want the tube removed either, like Jesse Jackson. But hey, Republican-bashing is totally okay on Slashdot. Liberal-bashing gets you modded down, every time.
At least Republicans showed up for the vote. Your beloved Democrats didn't even appear. Cowards.
Plasmons can be easily created in metallic nanotubes. Furthermore, it is possible to create them into an entangled state. This _in principle_ might be exploited on the quantum computation scale.
Sounds just like Slashdot but without the dupes!
does anyone else think the term 'plasmonics' sounds like something you'd see in the movie 'Barbarella?'
these chips would be in production in time for Duke Nukem Forever?
"Today, plasmons can only travel a few millimeters before dying, while today's chips are typically about a centimeter across."
Maybe its just me, but as electronics become smaller and smaller, wouldn't this be more and more possible?
This signature is part of a balanced post.
Hmm... Let's see...
7 years: Develop efficient plasmonic tech.
5 years: Create manufacturing process
+3 years: Design cpu
________________________________
15 years: Just in time for Duke Nukem Forever
The issue isn't the worth of the articles posted. They are usually good articles. The issue is that a disproportionate number of Roland's submissions get posted compared to other users, and those submissions usually contain links to his blog which links to the original article, instead of just linking to the original article. Roland makes money off of his blog for adviews, so the controversy is that Slashdot accepts most of his submissions and drives traffic to his blog.
I understand that some readers don't care about this "controversy." Some of us just don't like the rampant commercialism that's crept into Slashdot, and there's no other way to speak out on it (CmdrTaco dismisses it).
You don't need a thesis, dissertation, white paper, or science magazine to tell you that the closer you put things together the faster their particles can travel.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
The AC is offering a technique for viewing Roland Piquapaille's site without supporting him through ads. Hardly a troll. If it hurts him that much, he can stop submitting stories to Slashdot.
your critically thinking audience to read an article at Wikipedia.org? It's mass hysteria.
fiber optic cables can carry huge amounts of data, but are much bigger in size, but smaller in Cleveland.
Boom boom.
Now wash your hands.
For all you pr0n connissieurs ...
she could transmit ping balls out of her cha-cha
at incredible speed
Everyone has moved on to Wikimonics.
Check it out on the Gigabit Internet.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Nah. Forget plasmonics, fiber optics, quantum computing, and all this other junk... Let's make computers that are 100% mechanical, but built out of MEMS. Tiny gears, levers, pistons, pendulums, and other mechanisms will perform computations not previously possible with electronic computers. Better yet, let's return to the days of relay logic, but using nanotechnology to built microscopic relays. Good idea.
I havent read the article (this is slashdot after all) but the summary is terrible. (unless its the articles fault)
From the summary:
transistors carry small amounts of data and are extremely small, while fiber optic cables can carry huge amounts of data, but are much bigger in size.
Transistors are just switches in the digital world. Just like anything that would be modulating the optical carrier.
Fiber optic cables arent switches at all, or even active. You cant even compare them with transistors at all. Compare transistors maybe with an optical switch (which are ususally transistor actuated) or compare fiber optic cable with wires, but not transistors with FO cables.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
While I will agree there are other factors that affect a CPU, this formula does provide a bottom reference value to demonstrate that increased CPU frequency... regarless of effeciency... will always consume more energy.
There are other fundimental constants in information theory that demonstrate a quantum effect for a single bit of data being manipulated... regardless of the effeciency of the device that is being used. There are fundimental information theory limits to how little energy can be consumed to flip that bit, and the formula of E=hf is a good place to start and try to figure out just how much energy must be used to change a one to a zero and back. The emmission and absorbtion of photons will increase entropy, and will eventually lead to a loss via emmision into the IR band. This generates heat.
While an optic fibre is quite efficient, it will still have problems in massed quantities found in a CPU. And if the CPU clock frequency is increased to the degree claimed (100,000 times), I think the statement of the grandparent post, "A Pentium would be like a refrigerator to this CPU" is a very true statement. An optical system isn't that much better than copper or gold wires.
You ahve to charge a line with capacitance C above a certain threshold voltage V to open the transistor gate F times a second, giving you dissipated power of F*CV^2/2 just for that one line -- note V _squared_.
;-) ).
Of course if you switch to superconductor logic you would not have to chagre the whole line (and there is no voltage except the instance Josephson jucntion switches), but this is a topic for another discussion.
Other than that, yes, you are correct that you will need roughly 100,000 times more energy to run 100,000 times faster, but your energy is limited by the fact that you want to be safely above kB*T noise to switch in a non-random fashion (lowering T helps a lot
Paul B.
Come on Roland, give us a break . . . you obviously don't understand what your writing about. Your analogies make no sense, your summarize is full of gross holes and you're trying to "sex-up" plasmons by calling a natural phonomena a technology and saying that it's something "new" when it is not. And seems you're doing this to attract hits to your blog so that you can sell ad space.
I know this post is harsh, but I have to say that it appears that you are attempting to exploit the /. community for your own personal financial gain. We /. readers aren't as gullible or stupid as you seem to think . . .
wouldn't plasmonics make van eck phreaking not feasible??
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Plasmons are generated when, under the right conditions, light strikes a metal. The electric field of the light jiggles the electrons in the metal to the light's frequency, setting off density waves of electrons. The process is analogous to how the vibrations of the larynx jiggle molecules in the air into density waves experienced as sound.
This analogy makes no sense because this is not analogous to how the larnyx jiggles air. The larnyx squeezes together and air is pushed through causing the larnyx to vibrate. In the case of the larnyx, the squeezing of the larnyx as air is exhaled causes flaps of tissue to vibrate . . . . How is this analogous to photons striking metal?
A much better analogy would be how throwing a stone into a pond causes the water to vibrate. Or throwing a stone at a piece of metal causes sonic vibrations.
Roland really should do his homework before coming up with his half baked analogies. For homework on the larnyx and how it works, he could start here.
In Italy even babies know plasmons!!
Here is proof!
No, that's wrong. Look up Turing's theorem.
:)
Or, if you prefer, just imagine that you have this MEMS chip... then you build a working 3-d model of it in a computer and let it run... you'd get the same calculations from it. It might be faster, and it could be analog making it a bitch to simulate on a digital electronic CPU (you can use an analog electronic one), but unless you're talking quantum computing there are no calculations that can't be done with current CPU technology.
In fact, the only thing that a MEM system might be able to do that a regular CPU can't is crash when you shake your laptop
But wouldn't the slashdot effect cause him to lose money due to the excessive bandwidth?
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
If you executed 2 = 2.5 then the statement "two plus two does not equal five, even for large values of 2" would be proven false in any following code.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...overclocking his fingernail computer by swapping the green CMD (Cuticle Mount Device) LED in it for a blue one. Geeks could have nail-size competitions and "hand clusters". The mind boggles.
With a name like that, plasmonics doesn't have to have any point as long as it also looks cool. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
An optical system isn't that much better than copper or gold wires
Not true! Optics can scale to much higher frequencies than electronics due to the fact that electrons have mass and photons don't. As a result, the electrical system has a much higher impedance in relation to the clock pulse. You are right about E=hf and entropy; however an optical system will in theory take much less energy.
...or gram, supercomputing clusters measured in kilolitres. Do your upgrades with a plastic jug and a funnel. I can't wait! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Fiber optic cables arent switches at all, or even active.
Actually, some of them are.
One really useful example is doping the fiber with small amounts of an atom that lases in the frequency band of the light being carried. Then you wrap a bit of the fiber around a lamp giving off a suitable higer pump frequency of light. Result: A repeater amplifier. Feed it a little power and it boosts your signal.
There are several other hacks. (At least one of them is a logic gate.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There are fundimental information theory limits to how little energy can be consumed to flip that bit, and the formula of E=hf is a good place to start and try to figure out just how much energy must be used to change a one to a zero and back. The emmission and absorbtion of photons will increase entropy, and will eventually lead to a loss via emmision into the IR band. This generates heat.
Well, yes, but that energy is miniscule, even at optical frequencies. Even if you assume that it was changing a megabit of information every clock cycle for an entire second, that's still only 7 watts. And that's a processor that's well over a billion times more powerful than a modern processor. That's a perfectly efficient processor, yes, but you get the point.
And if the CPU clock frequency is increased to the degree claimed (100,000 times)
As I posted elsewhere, if the CPU clock frequency is that high, we're building computers out of individual atoms, which is, I believe, a harder task than dealing with dissipating 7 watts.
The physical constant which hurts you the most at these frequencies isn't Planck's constant. It's the speed of light.
A few years back there was some fuss about asynchronous chips. Looks to me like this is the solution to the distance problem.
I'm curious what part of a CPU they were saying was a couple cm accross. The die itself, where all the transistors are is probably less than a square CM in most cases. Given the fact that half or more of that is cache memory and the fact that most computation takes place within an area probably less than a few mm in length, it seems all they would need to do is repeat the signal every stage or so. But maybe this is why it's so difficult.
I made a false assumption... I thought you could see all of the rejected submissions in a user's profile. I was wrong.
This post set me straight.
However, 6 accepted submissions in under 30 days is quite suspicious. Perhaps he made 300 submissions, and the editors only accepted 6...
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
This post set me straight.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Oh, I miss the ground just fine.
Tell me what to do about this planet that keeps jumping up and smacking me in the butt when I try to fly!
In Soviet Russia a beowulf cluster of these things imagines you welcoming your new, neural-network overlords.
I get the moving lots of data around at massive speeds concept. However, how about some basic logic gate or even a transistor like functionality using plasmons? Wouldn't THAT be what would bring faster chips closer?
I mean, having a pipe that can transport huge amounts of data at the speed of light is great, but wouldn't the feasibility of a chip depend on the capability of routing all that data based on basic logical conditions?
Kinda like no use having a missile that can carry a million tons and fly at Mach 100 if you can't control where it goes...
Or am I missing something here?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
.. its plasma...
I think a few more science classes would help Roland to make more sense and sound less like a pseudo-scientific perpetual-motion troll. I think he has a future in advertising, or maybe he could work for Transmeta. :)
Visit the best Liberal Blog: DU
Duct Tape. Put lots of those small things together, add some chewing gum and you've made a bomb.
Just paint it pink and activate a cheap and simple Somebody Else's Problem field.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
If we are going to get CPU speeds to Terahertz or Petahertz frequencies, I will have to agree that the physical restraints of the speed of light are going to be a very major factor with CPU designs. Also, I don't know of any physical device manufactuer who is even remotely claiming even a 1% efficiency for storage and manipulation of a bit. (That would be a huge marketing ploy if it ever were achieved.) Physical devices, even optical systems, are far less efficient than that. There is no way that they are > 100,000 times more energy efficient than conductor/semi-conductor systems if simply because it would have been done already if the savings were that substantial.
I remember a speech by Adm. Grace Hooper where she was holding in her hands what she called microseconds, nanoseconds, and picoseconds. Basically a loop of wire that in the respective lengths of times it would take for an ideal signal to travel down that much wire. A good talk, and she was willing to give away quite a few nanoseconds, much less picoseconds. It really gets the concept of distances in small times to a perspective that your mind can grasp real easily.
Still, even assuming that we can overcome some of the issues with FTL communication at some point in the future, Planck's constant is going to be lurking in the background ready to bite even if we are using individual quarks for gate switching.
It is neat to see just what "hard" limits you can put on Moore's Law based on other hard physical constants from "hard science". It is also telling that electronic component manufacturers are having to get creative (such as the optical technologies being discussed in the article under discussion) in order to push systems beyond what appears to be hard limits to current manufacturing technologies.
Something beyond a photomask on lithographed semi-conductors must be done to get another 1000x increase in CPU speeds. Manufacturers are already using X-rays to get the fine details that are needed for the device manufacturing. If the frequencies get much higher, it will move into the gamma-ray section of the EM band.
Also, I don't know of any physical device manufactuer who is even remotely claiming even a 1% efficiency for storage and manipulation of a bit. (That would be a huge marketing ploy if it ever were achieved.) Physical devices, even optical systems, are far less efficient than that. There is no way that they are > 100,000 times more energy efficient than conductor/semi-conductor systems if simply because it would have been done already if the savings were that substantial.
Optical systems are orders of magnitude (maybe not 5 orders, but at least 2 or 3) more efficient than electronic ones, simply because there's no resistance and because you can multiplex signals optically rather than needing to do it electronically.
A good talk, and she was willing to give away quite a few nanoseconds, much less picoseconds. It really gets the concept of distances in small times to a perspective that your mind can grasp real easily.
Speed of light is a foot per nanosecond (literally: google it - it's 0.98 ft/ns), or 10 mils per picosecond. Easy enough. Incredibly useful mnemonic if you need to generate a delayed signal. "Get me 20 feet of cable, I need a clock-cycle delay." (There's a factor of 2-ish in there for the signal speed, but it's not that big a deal, and easy enough to remember).
Still, even assuming that we can overcome some of the issues with FTL communication at some point in the future, Planck's constant is going to be lurking in the background ready to bite even if we are using individual quarks for gate switching.
You realize that you are considering the speed of light to be a "soft" issue (as opposed to the "hard" limits from energy concerns). What makes you think that the speed of light is any less "hard" than the other concerns? Or, put another way - if we can get around the speed of light issue, I guarantee we can get around the entropic considerations (for one thing, the two aren't independent constraints).
Something beyond a photomask on lithographed semi-conductors must be done to get another 1000x increase in CPU speeds. Manufacturers are already using X-rays to get the fine details that are needed for the device manufacturing. If the frequencies get much higher, it will move into the gamma-ray section of the EM band.
Nah, you use non-optical methods, like electron beam lithography (which is planned). But that's all scale issues. You can't get another thousand-fold increase in CPU speeds. It's not going to happen. Another tenfold increase is not going to happen. CPU speed increases were done and through the instant you saw "drive" stages appear in the chip design to compensate for speed of light delay. They have hit the wall. The main increase in computing power at this point will come via increases in computational ability, not computational frequency.
I think that FTL communication is a virtual impossibility, and some very fundimental physics reasoning must be developed to make it happen.
I only comment about FTL communication because the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office granted a patent for FTL communication. The examiner must have flunked out of college to have approved the concept, but for the next 10-15 years such a process is patented, even if a physical impossibility. Someone (perhaps with a perpetual motion machine) must think this is possible to accomplish.
Someone (perhaps with a perpetual motion machine) must think this is possible to accomplish.
And if that person has a perpetual motion machine and FTL travel, then he can get around both the speed of light issues and the heat issues!
I honestly think that he's trying to launch a career as a blogger/technology writer
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no no no , the ONLY reason his site exists is to reap advertising, NOTHING else.
Now, a good site that has a real reason to exist, and has advertsiing, fine.
but this site ONLY exists to reap advertising, and has no product, and is clearly POOR and shouldn't be on
Which is why people hate it!
I considered setting up a network of blogs with auto scriting rss header publishing, 1 line commentary and advertising to plop myself into a nice semi=-automatic content gravy train to get a few google bucks my way... then I stuck a fork in my penis as punishment for such a bad thought.
THen I liked it and set up a self mutilation dwarf scat pr0n site, and became rich. so there is an obvious moral to this tale.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com