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IBM to Unveil Major Tech Advances
mr wrote to us to point out an article on IBM in today's SF Chronicle. IBM, starting on Monday at the Internation Electron Device Meeting, will be disclosing eighteen new inventions coming out of their labs. IBM goes to so far to say that it will keep Moore's Law [?] around for at least another decade. The article also talks about some of IBM's recent advancements as well as describing some of the new stuff to be unveiled.
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Motorola today said that they had found a way to make transistors 4 times smaller and be implementable in a short time-span. It reduces power consuption and allows for speed increases. This was on your favourite site.
The trench technology looks cool, burying the DRAM under the processor so it doesn't have to be next to it. That should increase yield whilst not compromising on capabilities of the processor. How much DRAM can you fit in 100mm^2? 400mm^2? That would be the amount of 2nd or 1st level cache your Athlon/Alpha processor could have built in, running at full speed!
Looks like all the money IBM has historically put into general R&D is paying off once again. That's one thing Big Blue has usually gotten right....and something other large tech firms can learn from. Fund your scientists, and don't necessarily expect products immediately from them. Let them do basic research, and the products will follow.
-- JackCat
All the standard benefits of Open Source (bug cleaning, extra features like URL checking, &c.)
The warm fuzzy of knowing that /. is putting its money where its mouth is. IOW, as perhaps the discussion site for Open Source, /. would do well to directly and concretely support the ideals we all support as a community.
So how about it, CmdrTaco? How about letting us take a crack at it?
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
Now what I'm really wondering is this : at least one theory suggests that the government is in the process of doing to MS what it did to IBM back in the 80's. If that's true, and the DOJ keeps MS so tangled up over the next decade that competitors emerge, does anybody think that Microsoft will reinvent itself in a similar way? Sure, we can all hate MS as the big bad corporate enemy now, but we all did that 20 years ago, too, when it was IBM. Now we love them.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Very true, the primary bottle neck in computers these days is memory and network latency. I think that the advances IBM is showcasing here will really pay off though in decreased power requirements which are becoming increasingly important as embedded devices appear. and the combination of Processor and Memory is an extremely attactive option as it relieves requirements on the bus.
intersting work is being done in this direction under the Processor-in-Memory (PIM) project.
Another mechanism to decrease the effect of this memory latency is to use large numbers of low-level threads (often automatically generated by the compiler) to mask latency. By decreasing the context switch penalty to a single cycle (or less with interwoven threads) and then switching on every cache miss substantial benifits can be made. One example of this is Tera computing MTA architechture. For certain common simulation tasks the 4-processor TERA machine blew away a multi-node Origin and Cray computer according to This NASA report.
Also, Sun's new MAJC architechture uses threads to mask latency.
Interwoven threads (where the processor switches thread every clock cycle) has the benifits of removing branch and data dependancies from a processor pipleine, thus removing the need for processor complexity like data forwarding, speculative execution, and the like. An example of this technique can be found a the TIPSI Project.
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These are all nice new technologies, but let' s hope IBM knows how to use them. Historically IBM has created quite a few technologies; unfortunately the management has, in the past, simply thrown the innovations away. Here are a couple examples:
On the other hand, many IBM innovations did make it, such as the magnetic hard drive. IBM still makes great hard drives.
The article didn't say it, but allowing RAM transistors to exist below other circuitry effectively doubles the data density of existing DRAM chips. How does tens of gigabytes of RAM sound? The problem: how do you cool double the amount of heat coming from those RAM chips?
I am looking forward to the faster and better computers and devices that will come from these innovations.
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Oh no! I've been sucked into
:) True. I'd probably be more worried about it if I wasn't surrounded by people who are very interested in that sort of thing. It's a fact of life that industry wants profiling information.
At least IBM is taking the right approach -- "We want profiling information so that we can help streamline the information we're providing to you." If I know you play tennis, there's two ways you can look at it. One is, "Oooo good, now I can sell him more tennis balls." Everybody hates this, of course, because nobody likes to feel like a target. But the second is, "Hey, you know what? Maybe I really am interested in knowing whose got a deal on tennis balls." Sometimes targeted messaging does actually work. It's really the same thing that the demographics have always been, only with better profiling they really know. They're not assuming "Oh, because you're in group X, there's a Y% likelihood that you play tennis."
There's a new movement in this area. That's to get away from the use of the word "targeting" and to start making use of expressions like "1:1" and "relationship". People are happier having a relationship with the businesses they use. The whole point of the IBM focusgroup commercial is a bunch of people being pissed off because the ad people don't know them.
And just in case anybody is prepared to argue that "1:1 relationship" is just new marketing hype for the same old spam, let me put it this way. When my grandfather walked into the local hardware store, the shopkeeper could say "Hello, Dan! Getting ready to send the kids off to college pretty soon, aren't ya? Got a good sale on bookcases down in aisle 3." And he would never, ever say "Have ya seen our sale on house paint?" if he knew that my dad had aluminum siding. And service like that was *appreciated*. People go on to the internet today and they ask where all the service went. The optimist in me says that all this 1:1 relationship stuff is actually a way to try and bring that *back*. If I really thought that I was just coming up with a better mousetrap (or in this case, spamtrap), I don't think I'd be working where I work.
d
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
"I'm worried. We have those press announcements on Monday, and you -know- Slashdot'll cover them. Our servers will never cope!"
"It's ok. I've just put up some web pages, pre-announcing the announcements. If the servers melt down this week, we'll still have the weekend to replace them, and Slashdot readers don't care about repeat announcements."
"That's cunning! Do you think they'll fall for it?"
"I think so. The system load was showing 490% CPU usage, and rising fast, the last time I looked."
* In the distance, the sound of a hard disk spinning out of the drive bay and colliding with a UPS unit. An IL&M techie is on-hand to supply the effects *
* Outside the building, the T1 link is glowing red, then blue, before finally exploding as the energy from the packets causes the fibre to undergo nuclear fusion. *
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)