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The Death of the Silicon Computer Chip

Posted by kdawson on from the aye-and-it-had-a-good-run dept.

Stony Stevenson sends a report from the Institute of Physics' Condensed Matter and Material Physics conference, where researchers predicted that the reign of the silicon chip is nearly over. Nanotubes and superconductors are leading candidates for a replacement; they don't mention graphene. "...the conventional silicon chip has no longer than four years left to run... [R]esearchers speculate that the silicon chip will be unable to sustain the same pace of increase in computing power and speed as it has in previous years. Just as Gordon Moore predicted in 2005, physical limitations of the miniaturized electronic devices of today will eventually lead to silicon chips that are saturated with transistors and incapable of holding any more digital information. The challenge now lies in finding alternative components that may pave the way to faster, more powerful computers of the future"

48 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. I'll... by PachmanP · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...believe it when I see it!

    --
    You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
    1. Re:I'll... by scubamage · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I agree. We have the methods to use other material, but silicon is plentiful and VERY cheap. Like, the majority of the earth's composition cheap. Grab a handful of dirt ANYWHERE and a large portion will be silicon. Even if it gets replaced for certain high end hardware, I doubt silicon will be going anywhere anytime soon - its simply too affordable.

    2. Re:I'll... by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not as if carbon is scarce either.

    3. Re:I'll... by somersault · · Score: 4, Funny

      I always wondered why those implants felt like a bag of sand..

      --
      which is totally what she said
    4. Re:I'll... by ScrewMaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I doubt silicon will be going anywhere anytime soon - its simply too affordable.

      Yes, and we're so damned good at manipulating it. All this newfangled stuff is pie-in-the-sky at this point. Yes, I suppose we'll eventually replace it for the likes of high-end processors, as you say, but everything else out of silicon for a long time to come.

      People keep bring up Moore's Law, as if it's some immutable law of physics. The reality is that we've invested trillions of {insert favorite monetary unit here} in silicon-based tech. Each new generation of high-speed silicon costs more, so that's a lot of inertia. Furthermore, if Guilder's Rule holds true in this case (and I see no reason why it shouldn't) any technology that comes long to replace silicon will have to be substantially better. Otherwise, the costs of switching won't make it economically viable.

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    5. Re:I'll... by petermgreen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm pretty sure the cost of the raw material is a negliable part of the costs of making semiconductor grade silicon. Most of the costs are in the very energy intensive purfification processes.

      The real advantage of silicon for many years was that SiO2 was/is a decent gate materal for mosfets and insulator for insulating the metal from the main body of the IC and could be grown easilly on the surface of silicon. But afaict this advantage has dwindled as we need CVD deposited insulators for insulating between multiple metal layers anyway and as processes have got smaller there is a push to switch to other gate materials for better performance.

      The main advantage of silicon right now is probablly just that we are very used to it and know what does and doesn't work with it. Other semiconductors are more of an unknown.

      Even if silicon gets displaced from things like the desktop/server CPU market though I suspect it will stick arround in lower performance chips.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    6. Re:I'll... by geekoid · · Score: 3, Informative

      replace 'better' with 'more value'.

      For example:
      If it costs 1/100 the price but seen no end users gains in 'speed' and/or 'power' it could replace silicone. It's not better at doing anything, it just has a higher value.

      "All this newfangled stuff is pie-in-the-sky at this point."

      hmmm, some of this is a lot farther along then pie in the sky.

      Most people on /. don't even seem to understand Moore's law and think it has to do with speed and power;which is doesn't those are artifacts of the law.

      Finally:
      The real problem with silicone is the fabs. They are running into some serious problems at these incredibly small sizes. Some fabs are problems with metal atoms in the air, atom that are below detection and the ability to remove.

      I am not dooming and glooming silicone here(although there are some advantages to hitting a minimum size) it's just that some problems aren't going away and are getting harder to deal with and the past work a rounds aren't cutting it.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    7. Re:I'll... by iamhassi · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "I doubt silicon will be going anywhere anytime soon - its simply too affordable."

      Agreed. Besides, they've been saying this since the 90s, that silicon can't possibly get any faster and it'll be replaced very soon.

      I call BS. They had 350 gigahertz silicon chips 2 years ago:
      "At room temperature, the IBM-Georgia Tech chip operates at 350GHz, or 350 billion cycles per second. That's far faster than standard PC processors today, which range from 3.8GHz to 1.8GHz. But SiGe chips can gain additional performance in colder temperatures....SiGe chips, the scientists theorized, could eventually hit 1 terahertz, or 1 trillion cycles a second."

      I think silicon is safe for awhile longer.

      --
      my karma will be here long after I'm gone
    8. Re:I'll... by gyranthir · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The issue of Carbon is the cost, scalability, accuracy, and timeliness/speed of nanotube production. Not the resource itself.

    9. Re:I'll... by scubamage · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You make some good points and I can't really argue them. As the die sizes continue to get smaller, silicon wafers must be more and more pure because tinier artifacts in the wafer can cause issues in the manufacturing process and thats going to be pretty unavoidable. However it also means that more dies can be stamped onto each wafer which should negate the number that are lost. I was meaning more that even if computer hardware is replaced with something else, things which need lower grade integrated circuits are still going to use silicon. I mean, you don't need a 1thz processor for a car's ECU, or for a garage door opener. And as more and more appliances become "smart" more things are going to need lower end chips - so I highly doubt that silicon is going anywhere. Maybe not for pc's, but everything else that is just starting to get 'wired' silicon is going to be around for a VERY long time.

    10. Re:I'll... by twistedsymphony · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The issue of Carbon is the cost, scalability, accuracy, and timeliness/speed of nanotube production. Not the resource itself.
      What's that quote? "Necessity is the mother of Invention." or something along those lines.

      Silicone was expensive to refine and manufacture at one point too. Like all new technologies the REAL cost is the in manufacturing and the cost goes down once we've manufactured enough of it to refine the process until we know the cheapest and quickest ways to do it.
      --
      Collector's Edition
    11. Re:I'll... by gyranthir · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That may be true, but that isn't going to change in 4 years. The replacement ideas have been around for a good while now and still productions, repetition, and scalability are still very not cost effective or scalable to even minimal production needs. And not to nitpick it's Silicon, not cone.

    12. Re:I'll... by maxume · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Those are all issues with silicon as well(crystals vs nanotubes...), they are just reasonably well solved.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
    13. Re:I'll... by maddriller · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It is sort of silly to declare the end of life for one technology when the technology to replace it is not yet in place. Every year for the last twenty people have proclaimed the end of silicon's reign, yet we still use silicon. The is a huge investment in the existing silicon infrastructure that will have to be duplicated in any replacement technology. There is also the educational inertia - engineering schools are still teaching people to use silicon and it will be many years before they start teaching anything else. Silicon will be around for a long time to come.

    14. Re:I'll... by Beetle+B. · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Like all new technologies the REAL cost is the in manufacturing and the cost goes down once we've manufactured enough of it to refine the process until we know the cheapest and quickest ways to do it. Cost is not the main problem with nanotubes.

      Nanotubes have a certain chirality - denoted by (m,n) with m and n being integers. Those two numbers define the properties of the nanotube (e.g. if m-n is a multiple of 3, the nanotube is metallic - otherwise it is semiconducting). They also determine the radius.

      So far no one has come up with a way to get a nanotube of a certain chirality. They just synthesize many nanotubes and then pick manually the ones they want - if it exists in the sample. Until they can do this, the nanotube industry will not become a reality.
      --
      Beetle B.
    15. Re:I'll... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Nitpicking? I hope you're being sarcastic. :) If you had pointed out grammatical errors, that might be nitpicking. But a person is pretty far into "STFU" territory when they presume to say something meaningful about the element silicon and confuse it with silicone.

    16. Re:I'll... by smackt4rd · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That 350GHz chip is probably much simpler and easier to build than a CPU, but the fact remains that it'd be incredibly difficult to just try and switch from Si to some other semiconductor and be able to build something cheap. We're already starting to see the manufacturers switch their architecture to multi-core CPU's. I think that's alot more practical than trying to switch to an exotic material.

    17. Re:I'll... by scubamage · · Score: 2, Funny

      absolutely positively undeniably 100% wrong I deny your reality and substitute my own ;)

    18. Re:I'll... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2, Funny

      I mean, you don't need a 1thz processor for a car's ECU, or for a garage door opener.

      absolutely positively undeniably 100% wrong

      sometime in the 1Thz-Garage-Door-Opener-Overlord-future:

      GARAGE_OWNER: "Open the garage door please, Hal"

      GARAGE_DOOR: "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.

      You're saying that you want this sort of thing to happen? No thanks. I like my appliances simple and mute, thankyouverymuch.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    19. Re:I'll... by Zaatxe · · Score: 3, Funny

      Grab a handful of tit ANYWHERE and a large portion will be silicone.

      There, I fixed that for you.

      --
      So say we all
    20. Re:I'll... by Beetle+B. · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The issue is not so much that some are being "wasted". The problem is selecting the ones you want. How do you automate that? You have a process that gives you lots and lots of nanotubes. How do you automatically filter out the ones you want? That's been the problem since day 1, and has not been resolved.

      --
      Beetle B.
    21. Re:I'll... by gyranthir · · Score: 4, Informative

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon

      No one said anything about mass production in 1916, read the post again.

      We started learning to purify it in the 1910's.

      From Wikipedia:
      The earliest method of silicon purification, first described in 1919 and used on a limited basis to make radar components during World War II, involved crushing metallurgical grade silicon and then partially dissolving the silicon powder in an acid. When crushed, the silicon cracked so that the weaker impurity-rich regions were on the outside of the resulting grains of silicon. As a result, the impurity-rich silicon was the first to be dissolved when treated with acid, leaving behind a more pure product.

      From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit
      The first integrated circuits were manufactured independently by two scientists: Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed a patent for a "Solid Circuit" made of germanium on February 6, 1959. Kilby received several US patents.[4][5][6] Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor was awarded a patent for a more complex "unitary circuit" made of Silicon on April 25, 1961. (See the Chip that Jack built for more information.)

      The first integrated circuits contained only a few transistors. Called "Small-Scale Integration" (SSI), they used circuits containing transistors numbering in the tens.

      SSI circuits were crucial to early aerospace projects, and vice-versa. Both the Minuteman missile and Apollo program needed lightweight digital computers for their inertial guidance systems; the Apollo guidance computer led and motivated the integrated-circuit technology, while the Minuteman missile forced it into mass-production. These programs purchased almost all of the available integrated circuits from 1960 through 1963, and almost alone provided the demand that funded the production improvements to get the production costs from $1000/circuit (in 1960 dollars) to merely $25/circuit (in 1963 dollars).[citation needed] They began to appear in consumer products at the turn of the decade, a typical application being FM inter-carrier sound processing in television receivers.

      The next step in the development of integrated circuits, taken in the late 1960s, introduced devices which contained hundreds of transistors on each chip, called "Medium-Scale Integration" (MSI).

      They were attractive economically because while they cost little more to produce than SSI devices, they allowed more complex systems to be produced using smaller circuit boards, less assembly work (because of fewer separate components), and a number of other advantages.

      Further development, driven by the same economic factors, led to "Large-Scale Integration" (LSI) in the mid 1970s, with tens of thousands of transistors per chip.

      Integrated circuits such as 1K-bit RAMs, calculator chips, and the first microprocessors, that began to be manufactured in moderate quantities in the early 1970s, had under 4000 transistors. True LSI circuits, approaching 10000 transistors, began to be produced around 1974, for computer main memories and second-generation microprocessors.

    22. Re:I'll... by camperdave · · Score: 2, Interesting

      My admittedly limited understanding of carbon nanotubes is that they are self producing. What I mean by that is that if one stable tube diameter is 20 atoms, and another stable tube diameter is 30 atoms, then the 20 atom tube is going to continue to grow as a 20 atom tube. It won't spontaneously widen out to a 30 atom tube. If that is the case, then all you would need is a few seed nanotubes, and the right conditions.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    23. Re:I'll... by imgod2u · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's for RF chips and RF signals. Silicon Germanium (SiGe) is the material and the 350 GHz signal being propagated is a sine wave with the FET being kept in the linear region. Digital signals are much more difficult to get to 350 GHz.

      To give you an idea, in a mixed signal BiCMOS chip where the digital components are standard CMOS and there's a SiGe layer on top for the RF circuits, the RF transistors are capable of amplifying an input sine wave all the way to the multiple tens of GHz. In the same process, the peak switching frequency for a digital signal is around maybe 5 GHz for an inverter let's say.

      Digital switching has many properties that an analog signal does not. It has a knee frequency and rise/fall time requirements. It has to switch above and below the detection threshold (and regenerate the signal through each gate rather than propagate any low signal levels). Being able to have a transistor propagate a 350 GHz sine wave is orders of magnitudes easier (and possible) than having a flip-flop operate at 350 GHz using the same process technology.

    24. Re:I'll... by default+luser · · Score: 2, Interesting

      One of the problems you have is that gate volume is approaching thousands of atoms. This is a problem because certain regions need to be doped in order to make the silicon do it's job.

      What is the problem, you may ask? Well, just look at the Wikipedia entry you linked. Even doped silicon is still %99.999999 pure.

      So, you have your gate that is thousands of atoms in volume, and dopant concentration that is in the 1 million to 1 billion ratio...so what is the likelyhood that your gate is going to contain that one dopant atom you need in the lattice for best performance? Without that dopant, the performance of your gate suffers, and may not even work at all.

      --

      Man is the animal that laughs.
      And occasionally whores for Karma.

    25. Re:I'll... by speculatrix · · Score: 2, Funny

      this being slashdot, I'd like to inform most readers the parent is referring to the mammaries of the human female, which a small number of you will encounter privately in person and not just via pr0n websites or viewing through a pair of binoculars.

  2. Let them speculate ... by ScrewMaster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    [R]esearchers speculate that the silicon chip will be unable to sustain the same pace of increase in computing power and speed as it has in previous years.

    In the meantime, other researchers will figure out ways to make silicon work smarter, not harder.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    1. Re:Let them speculate ... by Himring · · Score: 3, Funny

      They can have my silicon chip when they pry it from my cold, dead, motherboard....

      --
      "All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
  3. Not again by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been hearing this claim every few years for the last 25. Remember optical computers in the mid-80s? How about gallium arsenide? CRAY-3 anyone?

    And of course what's really reaching a limit is not the CPU's, but our ability to use them effectively. See "TRIPS architecture" on the wiki as an example end-run around the problem that offers hundred-times improvements using existing fabs.

    Maury

    1. Re:Not again by esocid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, agree with you there. The article said they will be replaced within 4 years...yeah right. Maybe in 10 years something will come out that may be faster, but marginally more expensive. I don't see silicon exiting the technology world altogether within even the next 50 years. Some parts may be replaced but Si chips will still be kicking.

      --
      Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
  4. Much sillio articulo by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Let's think, a technology that has taken 60 years to go from lab to today's level, it's going to be superseded in five years by technology that has not yet made a single transistor or gate. Hmmmm..... Meanwhile silicon is not going to be improved in any obvious way, such as with ballistic-transistors, gallium-arsenide, silicon-carbide, 3-d geometries, process shrinkage, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.... No soup for you.

  5. Unlikely by aneviltrend · · Score: 5, Informative

    Intel's CTO Justin Rattner just gave a talk at Cornell two days ago; he covered this topic carefully and confirmed that Intel has the technology and plans to carry out Moore's Law for another 10 years on silicon. Technologies such as SOI and optical interconnects will be leveraged to hit this.

    It's not necessarily the size of the transistors that make chips hard to make these days either (although they are now giving us huge problems with leakage current). It's harder to route the metal between these transistors than it is to pack them onto the silicon. New processors from Intel and AMD have areas with low transistor density just because it was impossible to route the large metal interconnects between them. Before we can take advantage of even smaller transistors we'll need a way for higher interconnect density.

    1. Re:Unlikely by geekoid · · Score: 4, Interesting

      hmmm, I trust the people I know on the floor more then someone whose job it is to say things that maintain consumer confidence.

      It would be a stock hit to say "We will be replacing silcone in x period of time if X is any longer then 'right now'.

      Some new technologies solve those problems. Technologies in the 'we hobbled something together proof of concept stage, not the I wrote this down on paper stage.

      Some of it is impressive, whether or not there will b a practical way to mass produce it is another thing. If not, I can imagine a time in the future where only large entities that can afford 500K a chip will be using them. Or anyone at home that can afford the latest electron microscope, laser, super cooling.

      meh, I'm just glad the MHz war is pretty much subsided and we are FINALLY focusing on multi-core.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  6. Not every chip needs speed by Enleth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't know any numbers, but I think I can safely guess that the computer processor business is just a fraction of the whole silicon chip manufacturing business - maybe not a small fraction, but still. And the rest of the industry doesn't need extreme speeds - there are microcontrollers, integrated buffers, logic gates, comparators, operational amplifiers and loads of other $0.05 crap you got in your toaster oven, blender, wirst watch, remote-controlled toy car, printer, Hi-Fi, etc., etc. And there is an obvious priority for those: cheap and reliable. So the silicon is not going anywhere.

    --
    This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
    1. Re:Not every chip needs speed by MttJocy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Exactly if silicon is going to be phased out anywhere in 4 year (note the IF) it will be in extremely high end supercomputer type devices perhaps a decade or so later this might get enough research combined with economies of scale to hit the high end PC market, maybe another decade may go by and the development dollars earned from this will enable them to enter the price range of the rest of the PC market (note here at this point you will most likely have a motherboard with silicon chips with exception only of the CPU and possibly the GPU for high end gaming machines) even probably 50 years later your digital wristwatch will still be silicon it does not need more.

      Simply, silicon may begin to find competitors in the high end market for people with deep pockets but it will not die out in lower end devices for decades yet if ever (we need to come up with some very novel ideas before your wristwatch needs tens of gigahertz of processing power).

  7. Birth vs. Death by 192939495969798999 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This guy is confused. The BIRTH of the silicon chip is nearly over... now is when it will completely take over our environments. To put it another way: demand for silicon chips is as dead as demand for crude oil, corn, or other staples.

    --
    stuff |
  8. Wrong tag by Mantaar · · Score: 2, Funny

    This should really be tagged software, shouldn't it?

    While we're at it, might add that Duke Bend'Em Forever tag, too...

    --
    I'm an infovore...
  9. ECHO! Echo! echo! by Chas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This has been getting bandied about every time someone comes up with a new, spiff-tastic technology/material to build an IC out of.

    "THIS COULD REPLACE SILICON! WOOT!"

    Yet it keeps NOT happening. Again, and again (and again).

    The trailblazers keep forgetting, the silicon infrastructure has a LOT more money to play with than a given exotic materials research project. And, in many cases, what's being worked on in exotics can be at least partially translated back to silicon, yielding further improvements that keep silicon ahead of the curve in the price/performance ratio. Additionally, we keep getting better at manufacturing exotic forms of silicon too.

    So, until silicon comes to a real deal-breaker problem that nobody can work their way around, I SERIOUSLY doubt that silicon IC is going anywhere. Especially not for a technology that has taken several years, and recockulous amounts of money simply to get a single flawless chip in a lab.

    --


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!
  10. Not so fast... by jandersen · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The transistor was first patented in 1925 (look it up in Wikipedia) and the integrated circuit in 1949 - both fundamental for microchips - but we still use radio valves today, and not just for nostaligic reasons. Silicon will probably hang around for a long time to come, I think.

    For something else to replace silicon it will have to not only be better, but so much better that it will justify the investment, or it will have to offer other, significant benefits, like being cheaper to produce, using less power or being smaller. Of these, I think speed is probably the least important, at least for common consumers.

    Personally, I still haven't reached the point where my 3 year-old machine is too small or slow - not even near. It wouldn't make sense to upgrade, simply. I think most people see it that way, they would probably be more interested in gadgets than in a near-super computer.

  11. Four years, eh? Then what? by swordgeek · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Even if the hard limits of silicon circuits are reached in four years, we will NOT be switching to nanotubes, graphene, superconductors, or quantum computing. Any of those technologies are at least a decade away from commercial applications, and 15 years is more likely. If there's nowhere to advance after four more years (and I rather doubt that--we've got too much history proving us wrong), then we'll just grow out. Bigger silicon dies, bigger cache, more cores. Maybe we'll actually hit the terminus of Moore's law, but that won't stop computers from advancing, and it won't magically make any of the alternative technologies mature.

    When someone makes a nanotube 80486 that I can buy and use, THEN I'll start to believe we're close to a technology shift. Hell, give me a 4004 - at least it's a product.

    Bottom line: We're not there yet.

    --

    "People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
  12. Silicon Scaling by wilsonjd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Silicon scaling will run out. We will reach a point where we can no longer make working circuits any smaller, but it will NOT be in the next four years. 45, 32, 22 nm circuits are already in the lab. 16nm (which may be the limit,) is expected to be in production by 2018 (10 years from now.) After 16nm, quantum tunneling may be a problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_nanometer

    Intel thinks we may hit the limit by 2021. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5112061.html

  13. Silicon most common? No. by pleappleappleap · · Score: 2, Funny

    I know I'm being a little pedantic, but Silicon is NOT the most common element in the Earth. It is the most common element in the CRUST of the Earth. The most common element of the Earth is Iron. The Earth is an impure ball of iron oxides.

  14. Pet Peeve by pleappleappleap · · Score: 2, Informative

    Silicone != Silicon

  15. Homebrew graphene transistors by the_kanzure · · Score: 2, Interesting

    SciAm is running an April 2008 article on graphene, so here are my notes on graphene fabrication. This is pretty neat, and worth some amateur experimentation. You can make the AFM/STM for ~$100 USD. As for graphene, there are some instructions on that page for chemically synthesizing it, or just use pencil graphite and write over a piece of paper. Another cool idea is figuring if we can use mechanical force to use a very thin pencil tip to write a circuit. JohnFlux in ##physics on freenode mentions that resistors could be used as a poor man's piezo, just heat up the metal (or perhaps pencil) and it will move. It will move very slowly. But a start.

  16. The personal automobile is dead by Kjella · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...because the top speed has barely moved in the last decades. The commercial airplane is dead because the top speed has gone DOWN after the Concorde landed. WTF? If we really hit the hard limits of silicon, then there won't be half a dozen techs for terahertz speed waiting. It might mean that the next generation WON'T see improvements of many orders of magnitude like we have, that's it. Computers will be something that operate at some given performance and the world will shrug at it. In short, the world won't collapse if this completely uncharacteristic development comes to an end. And even then I suspect it will go on elsewhere, did you see flashmicro's 900GB 2,5" flash disk? Yes, at ungodly prices but I think we have a long way to go yet...

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    1. Re:The personal automobile is dead by Robotbeat · · Score: 2, Funny

      Wait, so does that mean that The Singularity won't happen?!? Say it ain't so! I was so looking forward to the Nerd Rapture by our friend, the Computer!

  17. gaas - a little nostalgia. by flaming-opus · · Score: 2, Informative

    gallium arsenide was a reasonable technology to pursue at the time. It had teething problems, was expensive to manufacture, and ccc ran into funding problems related to a drop off in defense spending after the end of the cold war. That is not to say that Gaas was a completely foolish technology for the time. There are many reasons to believe that it offered faster switching times, and smaller module packages than did ECL logic of the time. CCC was putting out a 500mhz machine in the early 90's, four years before ECL machines hit that speed, and six years before cmos could.

    Of course, wire delays started to become a concern for multi-board processors, and cmos began to deliver enough transistors on a package that out-of-order superpipelining became possible, and the performance advantage of a slightly higher clocked ecl/gaas processor evaporated. This is not to say that there was not a good six-seven year window of opportunity for gallium arsenide, while cmos was still pretty feeble. I'll also point out that gaas has continued to be used in specilized applications like serdes, high-speed signal-drivers, and cell-communications drivers. You're never going to get millions of mesfets on a chip, but they work really well, if you need a few dozen really fast drivers.

    As for trips, and a lot of other designs like it, it essentially is working on the problem that modern cmos introduced. We have more transistors than we know what to do with, but we can't drive them any faster. I've seen some clever designs that are very good at solving one type of problem. I have yet to see a design that solves the problem in the general case, and with minimal change in the programming model. A lot of smart people are working on the problem, however, so I suspect that something will come about; It may not happen quickly, however.

  18. Only half of the story. by IorDMUX · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Some very intelligent researchers at the Institute of Physics' Condensed Matter and Material Physics Conference came to some very intelligent decisions about the future of CPU's... but this is hardly the end of the silicon chip.

    In addition to some of the points made by other posters (Silicon CPU's will live on in smart systems, cheap systems, handheld systems, etc.), there is a whole world of silicon chips that are *not* CPU's! Analog and mixed signal circuits need highly linear devices--not just switches that turn on and off--which current silicon technology provides wonderfully. Our current analog design technology has nowhere near exhausted the possibilities on the tapestry that ten/twenty year old silicon fabrication technologies provide.

    Maybe graphene, nanotubes, or the Next Big Thing will change the high performance CPU niche, but silicon still provides everything we can manage to use for the rest of the IC world.

    Besides, I bet that graffiti will be quite a challenge with nanotubes.

    --
    >> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.