Slashdot Mirror
Reduce Transistor Power Consumption
revelCyllufyalP writes to tell us that University of Kentucky researchers have discovered a way to reduce the overall power consumption of transistors. From the article: "In order to improve computer chips' performance, transistors' size and gate insulators have to be continuously shrunken so that more components can be packed into a single chip. Computer chip producers were hitting a wall in downscaling the transistors and gate insulators because of their inability to reduce the leakage current of the existing gate insulators. This new technique will help the chip producers to develop more powerful chips with low-power consumption."
Seriously, we have some really good programs. Hank Dietz, Bill Dieter, and Tim Mattox have some exceptional results in parallel computing. Until recently, their $40,000 home-made cluster beat UK's million dollar HP Superdome cluster in Linpack ratings. The $40k even factors in the cost of student labor (in the form of pizza) to wire the cluster.
I just wish I could say the same for our CS department... It's been getting steadily better since the College of Engineering adopted it, but they switched to M$ Visual Studio .NET this year, and that really worries me... program internals shouldn't be hidden from the student at lower levels of computer science.
I hope I didn't /. aggregate.org too badly...
University of Kansas uses the acronym "UK"... This was slightly confusing during football season, but I figured our school must have been playing a team from the USA. In the title of science article, however, I sure as hell don't assume Kansas origion.