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IBM: Chip Making is Hitting Its Limits, But Our Techniques Could Solve That (zdnet.com)
IBM has devised materials and processes that could help improve the efficiency of chip production at the 7nm node and beyond. From a report: The company's researchers are working on challenges in the emerging field of 'area-selective deposition', a technology that could help overcome limitations on lithographic techniques to create patterns on silicon in 7nm processes. Semi Engineering has a neat account of lithographic patterning and why at 7nm there's growing interest in area-selective deposition. Techniques such as 'multiple patterning' helped ensure integrated circuits kept scaling, but as chips have shrunk from 28nm to 7nm processes, chipmakers have needed to process more layers with ever-smaller features that need more precise placement on patterns. Those features need to align between layers. When they don't, it leads to 'edge placement error' (EPE), a challenge that Intel lithography expert Yan Borodovsky believed lithography couldn't solve and which would ultimately impede Moore's Law.
Figure out how to solve the quantum tunneling gate leakage power problem and you've got a winner. Photolithography has never been identified as a show stopper to continued gate shrinkage. Gate leakage at these dimensions is.
...that, probably, only a few people here will understand. I'll simplify it: /s
They want to work at a very small scale, using very big words.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Instead of using lots of scripting languages and VM with frameworks that suck up huge volumes of memory and are so poorly written they require large amounts of CPU time to do very little, perhaps there should be a return to an emphasis on more effcient compiled languages that only use what resources they need at any given time.
Yeah I know, get off my lawn etc. But that fact that script kiddy coders don't like being told that their toy language is a bloated CPU hogging mess doesn't change the reality of the situation.
Instead of using lots of scripting languages and VM with frameworks that suck up huge volumes of memory and are so poorly written they require large amounts of CPU time to do very little, perhaps there should be a return to an emphasis on more effcient compiled languages that only use what resources they need at any given time.
With VMs:
Without VMs:
In an environment with "more efficient compiled languages" replacing VMs and big frameworks such as React or Qt, how would you recommend to bridge platform gaps?
I hope someone or many someones out there are working on reversible computing. It sounds like the only long-term way forward. https://spectrum.ieee.org/comp...
Why won't anyone belieeeeeve us?
What did you do there AC? Empty trashcans or get coffee for people with a clue?
Basic R&D is what got us the cool toys we have today. Companies doing research for the sake of research that may not be immediately profitable. This is what brought us wonderful things like the UNIX operating system and the microprocessor.
Most *progams* only run on one architecture anyway but perhaps you've not heard of compile time options in code that allow you to use the same source code for multiple platforms.
If you have designed your application with a model-view-controller paradigm, you can reuse the model layer across multiple platforms. However, you cannot so easily reuse view code across Win32, Cocoa, X11, Android, and Chrome OS DOM platforms without a multi-platform framework such as Qt, and I assume Qt is one of the "frameworks that suck up huge volumes of memory" that you mention. And even if you cross-compile your application to a platform that you don't have, it's a bit harder to cross-test the responsiveness of a GUI application, such as to test the macOS and iOS ports of your application without owning a Mac and an iPhone or iPad.
nm aren't comparable between companies. Each foundry is referring to a different thing when they call their process "x nm".
For example, TSMC's 7nm process yields 83 million transistors per mm^2. Meanwhile, the 10nm process Intel was working on yielded 100 million transistors per mm^2, indicating its average component size was smaller despite having a larger nm name. In fact, TSMC's 7nm process yields only twice the transistor density of Intel's 14nm process, not 4x as you'd expect if the nm were referring to the same thing.
Yes, on Windows the DLLs take quite a big amount of space, but only on disk
Is this true of macOS as well? This becomes doubly important as Macs switch to SSDs. And for developers who have a lot of users stuck behind satellite Internet or cellular tethering at $5 to $10 per GB, how well do Qt DLLs compress for distribution?
Besides, testing cross-compiled macOS binaries can still prove expensive for a micro-ISV.