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Towards Molecular Computing
pq writes "The NY Times has a progress report on molecular computers: the results are finally rolling in. This July, HP and UCLA reported molecular logic gates; now Yale and Rice are reporting the ability to cycle those gates on/off and HP is announcing conducting wires less than a dozen atoms across. Interesting review - to quote, `this should scare the pants off anyone working in silicon.' " Mmmm...nano.
If it does manage to remain the place to be, I'd suggest Assembler Alley, Polymer Pass (too chemical, maybe) or Nanogate Notch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I'm just pondering over the problems inherent in Quantum Computing.
The role of a technician could change drastically. Instead of fixing problems, a tech would just sit and observe the system at every given moment so that it runs properly. If the tech stops observing for any length of time the system would go haywire.
Then again... maybe it's not so different after all. :)
LouZiffer
Yes, smaller may be better for Place and Route, but what about the REALLY important stuff like - timing. (ok, the guy does P&R for a living, begin your rant). I'll argue that there are more time critical hardware designs than size critical hardware designs, but correct me if I'm wrong. Faster is better than smaller.
For the most part Smaller IS Faster. If the gate only has to travel 10000th of the distance in the nano-processor as opposed to the Silicon one, then it can move 1000 times slower and still be 10 times faster. And if it moves at the same speed, then it's 10000 times faster. Distance, Time, and Speed are directly linked. Changing one can change the others.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Now the rub on THAT whole idea is:
Will we have figured a way around population growth by that point in time? There IS something to be said for people dying by natural means. If things were to continue at that rate we would over poplate our galaxy. Of course I spose some people will still die in stupid ways...drunk driving/flying and the like. I don't know that I would WANT to live that long honestly. Of course I have severe moral issues with life extension in the first place. And futurist technology as a whole. That's for me to work out though. =)
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
No, not unless they use organic molecules to create actual replicating cells. Virus' require a complete and functioning cell with replicating DNA in order to do their deed. On another note, however, if there were replicating-cell computers, you would then have to worry about your monitor giving your computer cancer.- -----------------
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Well I'm 25 as well and that was my biggest question. Will I see it in my lifetime? Thank you for such a great response.
A bit of definition if i may:
by assembler do you mean mass production or just single unit fabrication?
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I've lived through some changes, and all I can tell you is it's hard to see very far ahead. But if I were you I'd try to get some coursework in neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Could someone with a bit of information in this area provide what they see to be a reasonable timeline for nanotech? I have been doing alot of pondering on technology growth and futurism lately and wondering how much I'll see in my lifetime, especially considering how much I've ALREADY seen in my lifetime.
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
When the techniques are refined sufficiently, it will be just about as easy as mixing the ingredients and stirring. This is where the claims of "dirt cheap" come from, and yes, they're quite serious about it.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I'm a bit familiar with the research at Rice, and basically they are building gates by deforming nanotubes in certain ways to alter their electrical characteristics. They've been playing with it and playing with it until they can build structure which act like logic gates. The implications boggle the mind.
I say its high time for nanotech logic to start ramping up, so this is very exciting. Silicon is only going to carry us so much further. Once you get down to a semiconductor gate that is 20 molecules across, the Physics get much more interesting, and electromigration starts eating your lunch.
A very interesting field to follow...
--Lenny
I'm interested in the possibilities of these minuscule gates to run on the tiny bits of power from a glucose/oxygen fuel cell. With some molecular photodetectors, gates like these could be used to make an artificial retina and restore sight lost due to age, injury or disease; with the tiny size of the gates, they could be made smaller than the cells they replaced.
Biomolecules don't seem to like heat very much, so really high-speed (and high-power) operation might not be the best use for these. But making up for it with massive parallelism, and taking hints (or outright copying) natural systems could lead us to a whole new world of technology that we might have trouble recognizing as computing. Still, I'm game for it!
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Faster computers make things more secure, not less. If I add one bit to my key, then to encrypt that key with just one more bit will hardly be noticeable. Encryption will go really fast.
But, decrypting the key with one more bit will require twice as many attempts in a brute force search.
See how that relationship works to make things more secure as computers get faster? Just make your keys longer. The only problem is remembering a passphrase long enough to make a long key.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
There are plenty of architectural improvements yet to be made in processor design. Once feature shrinking becomes even more difficult, clock speeds may begin to change more slowly, but chips will still improve in performance. More effor will be thrown into developing advanced architectural features around existing gate technology.
And don't forget the software side of technology! As more and more software is written towards a multi-threaded architecture, the speed advantages presented by multi-processing and multi-threading architectures will become even greater.
One development I am watching with rapt attention is the transition to Simultaneous Multi Threading Processors (SMT). This is still in the works, but processors such as the Alpha 21464 will be built around this design in the near future.
SMT procs move some of the process table down on to the processor itself such that the processor can fill time while waiting for a cache miss to be serviced by task switching to a seperate thread. Further, SMT allows simultaneous dispatch of instructions from *multiple* instruction streams. This sort of architecture makes much more efficient use of parallelism in hardware than current superscalar processors. Further, executing on the same chip, the different threads can synchronize *in cache* which is far more efficient than hitting memory like current SMP systems are forced to do. Very exciting...
There's no way a processor company would sell the same part for 10 years. If they can't shrink their gates any further, they'll just find new ways to exploit parallelism in hardware with more advanced architectures.
--Lenny