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."

Comments

Re:10-15 years?

[stonecypher]

Isn't "supercomputer" a bit of a relative term?

No. A supercomputer is a computer which can perform one teraflop. The origin of the term was to give the US Government a way to set export restrictions on computing hardware. A supercomputer from the 1970s is a supercomputer today. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever computers are fast today; the example that people seem to remember is the north carolina state professor who clustered eight PS3s to make a supercomputer. If the term was defined in the context of the speed of its day, why wasn't he laughed off of campus?

The article wouldn't make sense if it was a relative term. "Supercomputer" means one trillion floating point operations per second or better, period.