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Could HP Beat Moore's Law?
John H. Doe writes "A number type of nano-scale architecture developed in the research labs of Hewlett-Packard could beat Moore's Law and advance the progress of of microprocessor development three generations in one hit. The new architecture uses a design technique that will enable chip makers to pack eight times as many transistors as is currently possible on a standard 45nm field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip.""
The development board is going to use a FGPA, because a custom chip design would be too expensive. For later, they plan to produce it as ASIC to improve the price/performance ratio. With better FGPAs, they could stick to the FGPA for the end-user version which would help to reduce investment costs.
Quote about the ASIC design:
C - the footgun of programming languages
One of the reasons that Moore's law has so accurately predicted the continual doubling of storage and speed is that it offers companies an excellent guideline for product roll-out. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Customers expect computers to get more-bigger-better-faster at that rate, so companies have a production target. That provides a much more stable product ecosystem than one that is marked by a punctuated equilibrium of sudden large advances followed by unpredictable periods of status quo.
Yes, a simulation will never give identical results to the real chaotic system. The reason is that this is an example of two chaotic systems (one real, one simulated) which have small differences in their initial state (imperfect measurements) and equations (imperfect modelling). It is in the nature of such chaotic systems for their state to diverge.
However, this is irrelevant to the point you are trying to make, as it doesn't stop us from simulating a brain at all. To go back to the wheater simulation analogy: you may not be able to predict whether it is going to rain at spot X, but if the wheater simulation is good enough it will still show you general wheather patterns much like in the real world.
It's the same for a simulated brain. If the simulation is good enough, it will be conscious.
I understand why we can't predict the weather.
I understand why we can't _predict_ brain function.
I don't understand why that means we can't build a new brain that will simply remain equally unpredictable.
Just because a system is chaotic doesn't make it impossible to construct.
This is only true of some FPGA's. Xilinx, in particular, uses look-up tables to simulate logic (along with dedicated flip-flops). Actel, however, has a fine-grain architecture that uses basically a matrix of configurable (solid-state, flash-based) 3-input, 1 output tiles that very much resemble gates. Upon configuration (done once), a high voltage (higher than normal core or IO voltage) is applied and fuses the interconnects in these tiles to behave like the particular gate/flip-flop it's suppose to be have like.