Magnetic Transistor Could Cut Power Consumption and Make Chips Reprogrammable

ananyo writes "Transistors, the simple switches at the heart of all modern electronics, generally use a tiny voltage to toggle between 'on' and 'off.' The voltage approach is highly reliable and easy to miniaturize, but has its disadvantages. First, keeping the voltage on requires power, which drives up the energy consumption of the microchip. Second, transistors must be hard-wired into the chips and can't be reconfigured, which means computers need dedicated circuitry for all their functions. Now, researchers have made a type of transistor that can be switched with magnetism. The device could cut the power consumption of computers, cell phones and other electronics — and allow chips themselves to be 'reprogrammed' (abstract)."

Comments

Re:Chips are "reprogrammable"

[AK Marc]

EEPROMs as flash RAM or firmware is old, very old. But the idea of a processor being field reprogrammable *is* new. It's so new, nobody has anything that would benefit yet. Think of something like Cisco booting based off the startup config, then optimizing the processors based on the config. Port 2 shutdown? Divert the gates to process something else. Want to be able to turn anything on and off without any delays? Then consider dynamic memory allocations. Not dynamic storage, the way everyone thinks, but looking at whether there are 64 bit requirements, and if not, programming it as parallel 32-bit CPUs for extra speed, and if 64-bit is requiring, booting up in 64-bit mode. Got an idle encryption ASIC? Now you have another general processor.

You claim it is common, but has anyone ever released a CPU that changed dynamically? Rather than optimizing code for the CPU, optmize the CPU for the code. I see this being biggest in the area where ASICs are biggest, networking gear. Need more hardware encryption? Need more QoS profiles?