How much power does it take? Will it be the next wave of laptop/PDA monitors?
I may have just made this up, but I seem to remember from reading up on fp displays a couple of years ago that polymer based displays would maintain the picture when switched off. So, if the image wasn't changing (like most of a computer display), power consumption would be very low. I suppose an application like Q3 would use rather more power, unless you just stood still.
A reloadable flexible display may even replace the daily newspaper one day
This seems to support this, as a newspaper wouldn't be very useful if you had to recharge the batteries to carry on reading an article.
Is this really that useful?
on
Biotransistors
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· Score: 5
I don't see anything particularly new here. The article mentions using photosensitive bacteria to act as "biotransistors", and gets very excited about the fact that when light shines on a photosensitive bacterium, it yields up an electron that could be used to switch a primitive biotransistor. I don't see how this is really any different from a conventional semiconductor.
Also, the article mentions using these bacteria as optical amplifiers - nothing very exciting there either. Optical amplifiers have been around for quite a while now after all, in the form of Erbium Doped Fibre amps.
You're cpu is a 450MHz, it can theoretically execute 450 million instructions per second.
Surely a superscalar architecture (ie anything later than a Pentium) can issue more than one instruction per clock cycle? Granted, this isn't always the case by any means, unless the code is particularly parallel - but surely nop's don't have many data dependencies?
This sounds fairly similar to the Transmeta Crusoe to me. This new idea can be reconfigured to produce various CPU cores, whereas the Crusoe can interpret various instruction sets - similar end result.
This does add the interesting possibility of custom DSP stuff directly on the CPU though.
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How much power does it take? Will it be the next wave of laptop/PDA monitors?
I may have just made this up, but I seem to remember from reading up on fp displays a couple of years ago that polymer based displays would maintain the picture when switched off. So, if the image wasn't changing (like most of a computer display), power consumption would be very low. I suppose an application like Q3 would use rather more power, unless you just stood still.
A reloadable flexible display may even replace the daily newspaper one day
This seems to support this, as a newspaper wouldn't be very useful if you had to recharge the batteries to carry on reading an article.
I don't see anything particularly new here. The article mentions using photosensitive bacteria to act as "biotransistors", and gets very excited about the fact that when light shines on a photosensitive bacterium, it yields up an electron that could be used to switch a primitive biotransistor. I don't see how this is really any different from a conventional semiconductor.
Also, the article mentions using these bacteria as optical amplifiers - nothing very exciting there either. Optical amplifiers have been around for quite a while now after all, in the form of Erbium Doped Fibre amps.
You're cpu is a 450MHz, it can theoretically execute 450 million instructions per second.
Surely a superscalar architecture (ie anything later than a Pentium) can issue more than one instruction per clock cycle? Granted, this isn't always the case by any means, unless the code is particularly parallel - but surely nop's don't have many data dependencies?
This sounds fairly similar to the Transmeta Crusoe to me. This new idea can be reconfigured to produce various CPU cores, whereas the Crusoe can interpret various instruction sets - similar end result.
This does add the interesting possibility of custom DSP stuff directly on the CPU though.
It'll be big news when they cram 1Tbps through one tiny fiber cable.
Already done, according to this article.
IE 5.5 beta on win2k doesn't fix anything - it still works fine.