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One Step Closer To Speedier, Bootless Computers
CWmike writes "Physicists at the University of California at Riverside have made a breakthrough in developing a 'spin computer,' which would combine logic with nonvolatile memory, bypassing the need for computers to boot up. The advance could also lead to super-fast chips. The new transistor technology, which one lead scientist believes could become a reality in about five years, would reduce power consumption to the point where eventually computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices could remain on all the time. The breakthrough came when scientists at UC Riverside successfully injected a spinning electron into a resistor material called graphene, which is essentially a very thin layer of graphite. The graphene in this case is one-atom thick. The process is known as 'tunneling spin injection.' A lead scientist for the project said the clock speeds of chips made using tunneling spin injection would be 'thousands of times' faster than today's processors. He describes the tech as a totally new concept that 'will essentially give memory some brains.'"
Is it wrong that as fast as things as changing these days, part of me still hopes for one of these '1000x faster in 5 years' technologies to live up to its full promise?
I know it's coming; if not this tech than surely another one... I guess one hopes to live in interesting times, and I still dream for the day I wake up and there's a computer for sale that shatters Moore's Law. A computer 1000x faster than what was available the day before.
Faster, please.
(and thank you)
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
So, this is becoming a trend. Bad summary. It's not an outright lie, just misleading. From reading the article, one might get the sense that we might see this in products in 5 years. However, the article actually states that the guy said:
"I'm one of those researchers that really cringes at the thought of saying this [new technology] can be useful. I think for us, maybe within five years we can get one device working."
So, the guy is realistic, and not a douche. "We can maybe get one working in 5 years" is not the same as seeing it in devices in 5 years (which, again, wasn't explicitly stated in the summary, but i feel like thats what people would think).
In reality, we might get something in products in 10 years.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
But the one about 'You can keep them powered on', it's like a game changer from out of left field. Maybe booting will become irrelevant by then?
Not if they're running Windows. Doesn't it still have to reboot whenever you update the freaking PDF viewer?
Close, but not what I need - I need something to give my brain some memory!
You could have had faster booting via an OS from Japan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTRON
But MS and the US gov had it killed due to market intervention.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
even today's mainstream cpus are far more powerful than what our everyday tasks involve. even the fps-hungry gaming crowd has been reaching perceptive limits in regard to human eye, and the frame rate has become a sport, a statistical value.
unless society takes on seti, parallel computing etc as hobbies, we wont need more processing power in our daily lives.
Just wait till the next version of windows hits the shelves...
I'm fairly certain that computing power is like hard drive space or time 'till the deadline , we will always find ways to fill it, no matter how much we think we have in the beginning.
-I only code in BASIC.-
even today's mainstream cpus are far more powerful than what our everyday tasks involve.
Usually that's true. But today I was using Autodesk Inventor, which is a parametric CAD solid modeling system. That's one of the few desktop applications that can usefully use gigabytes of memory and a dozen CPUs.
(I worked on the development of AutoCAD in the early 1980s, when the problem was cramming usefully sized drawings into 640K of RAM, a 20MB hard drive, and an 0.25 MIPS CPU. It was a tough cramming job. I used to dream about the day when we could have a CAD system with real-time solid modeling, automatically connected to CNC machine tools, running on a desktop computer. It took four or five more orders of magnitude in CPU power to make it work, and it's here. I'm glad I got to see it happen.)
I'd settle for speedier, botless computers.
Those of us who don't get our electricity bill paid by our parents.
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Computers needing to "boot" is a relatively modern invention caused in part by hardware hotplug, backwards compatibility modes and reliability checks.
Most of the boot process is:
- Moving out of legacy modes (e.g. enabling increased capabilities from basic instructions sets to full modern ones, enabling different memory access models, enabling 64-bit etc.), ramping up core speed, enabling things like DMA and moving from "safe" memory timings to those that the chips report they can support when the negotiations finally take place, bringing up the non-boot CPU's, etc.
- Contention. Doing only a certain number of things on the bus at any one time, making the buses serial, making the buses have sub-buses and other ideas. Sometimes there is no quicker way to do things. Sometimes it *will* take 1000ms before the disk will respond that it's up to speed.
- Checking that RAM does indeed do what it's told, that a boot loader is present, that a floppy is present (yes, even on some modern BIOS's), checking IDE/SATA channels and retrieving capabilities, checking memory timings, checking PCI and USB buses, checking that disks are spinning, etc.
Some of my servers take up to 3 minutes to get to the point where they can actually load the first byte from disk to begin loading it. A lot of this time is BIOS handoff to the BIOS on the RAID cards (and sometimes the network cards), those RAID cards checking, assembling and enabling the drives, etc. With two RAID cards, we've just nearly doubled boot time. Proper (reasonable) memory checks of several GB of RAM still takes a while, even for a simple test. And yet there's still a minute or so of absolute complete waste as we start in some 8086 legacy mode and slowly have to ramp up disks, cards and our own CPU's, not to mention external hardware like USB and DVD drives "just in case". And then the OS has to go and do it all itself again later anyway.
This is why things like the LinuxBIOS (now called Coreboot) project actually work better and faster - when we KNOW what the BIOS needs to do, we find that lots of it is done twice, lots of it are unnecessary, lots of it can be delayed until we actually NEED the DVD drive, some of it can occur in the background because it will ALWAYS take a long time to start etc. But how many fixed sets of hardware does that project actually work on? Few. Because not only is it tricky to do that sort of analysis, but it's tricky to lock-down exactly what the BIOS needs to do and do better than the original BIOS.
We can have an "instant on" computer. It's easy. My ZX Spectrum did it nearly 30 years ago. My calculator does it now. The Psion organisers all did it. Most portable games consoles manage it. The thing you have to realise though is that it means: booting into a single, fixed OS that's tricky to upgrade, making power management apply to every process perfectly, fixing a set of hardware down that we know can always boot into a certain configuration very quickly, changing the way that all our chips work so they start in their best mode, not their worst (and thus probably destroying things like OS installers as we know them and making them specific to a machine type - no more installers modern OS on old computers, or old OS on modern computers), removing any sort of consistency checks and having to rely on things not going wrong or the hardware being able to handle all hardware errors (e.g. ECC memory for everything with reporting of anything it can't handle), and building every component so it doesn't "negotiate" or "initialise" but just works (e.g. even a keyboard controller can take some time to come back online at the moment, not to mention graphics, disks, USB buses, etc.).
Instant-on computers are always possible, and some of them are very useful for certain things. But generic PC's and instant-on won't happen until CPU's, disks and bus negotiations take literally fractions of a second for any operation (and thus we still do as many instructions to initialise but they take clock cycles