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Handheld Supercomputers in 10-15 Years?
An anonymous reader writes "Supercomputers small enough to fit into the palm of your hand are only 10 or 15 years away, according to Professor Michael Zaiser, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Engineering and Electronics.
Zaiser has been researching how tiny nanowires — 1000 times thinner than a human hair — behave when manipulated. Apparently such minuscule wires behave differently under pressure, so it has up until now been impossible to arrange them in tiny microprocessors in a production environment. Zaiser says he's figured out how to make them behave uniformly.
These "tamed" nanowires could go inside microprocessors that could, in turn, go inside PCs, laptops, mobile phones or even supercomputers. And the smaller the wires, the smaller the chip can be.
"If things continue to go the way they have been in the past few decades, then it's 10 years... The human brain is very good at working on microprocessor problems, so I think we are close — 10 years, maybe 15," Zaiser said."
Before anyone asks. Also you can imagine a beowulf cluster of these, as well as welcome the overlords.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
10-15 years from always, I'll wake up to my alarm clock, powered by cold fusion. I'll stumble down stairs and get the keys to the hover car from the kitchen and grab my hand held supercomputer. On the way to work, I'll play Duke Nukem Forever as my car flies me along the correct path.
My work here is dung.
I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
Sweet informative mod.
you can always tell a supercomputer by the big red "S" on its chest...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Because it doesn't result in as much attention grabbing. If I told you in 15 years, you would have a faster general purpose computer, that wouldn't be newsworthy now would it?
Here are the measurements of my super computer
200,000 Libraries of Congress, or 17 great lakes.
15 Empire state buildings, stacked end to end in a giant circle.
The power consumption of 3 New York Cities.
All the potatoes in Idaho.
Seating for 1.5 747 jumbo jets!
And enough punchcards to circle the moon!
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
No, I think we should insist on a fixed definition of any performance class, which would serve geeks because we could know unambiguously exactly how much computing capacity anybody means when they use a term like "supercomputer". You could even record a conversation and play it back twenty years later, and everybody would know whether we were talking about enough computing power to, say, crack a 56 bit DES key in less than a week.
It would benefit our colleagues in marketing, because coming up with a term for the next generation of practically achievable level of computational power would provide a focus for their frustrated creative energy. Why should all the burden of innovation fall on geeks? Next, our friends the lawyers also benefit, because they'll have a major fight every few years about whether the terms coined by the marketing people have become generic or not. This is a fight which they will eventually lose, providing us with another non-ambiguous, non-proprietary term for a level of computational performance.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What was that that just flew by me? Oh yeah! It was the vapor that is this article!
The game.
A little back-of-the-napkin calculation, and we can deduce that if those measurements are equal, then there are 110 bytes per Liter of water.
This makes sense -- if we freeze that Liter, each byte is approximately equivalent to a 1 cm x 3 cm x 3 cm chunk of ice, which I could easily fit into my mouth -- you might even say it's bite-sized.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai