We're not talking about that problem, we're talking about this patently false statement made by the GP:
We may be getting smaller, but as this happens we'll need higher voltages to force things to happen on that level.
I understand the problems facing the continued shrinking of transistors, as clearly you do, but the poster to whom I replied definitely doesn't. In fact, he's nearly completely opposite of correct, and even a basic layman's understanding of electronics usually prevents such completely backwards confusion. Something like the following would make much more sense, be correct, and capture some of the points of the article:
We may be getting smaller, but as this happens we'll need lower voltages to prevent things from happening unless we want them to.
You made the same point that I made when trying to help the GP reverse (and correct) his understanding: smaller geometries require lower voltages. You said:
If traces are 20 nanometres apart (0.02 micron), it only takes 0.4 volts to short the chip.
Now compare your (sane) statement above with this:
We may be getting smaller, but as this happens we'll need higher voltages to force things to happen on that level.
There is no way to reconcile these two. One is wrong, one is right. Hint: you're not wrong.
The total current per transistor required has done nothing like skyrocket; in fact it has decreased significantly. The total current used by a CPU is higher because there are more transistors on the die (and the CPU can do more in less time.) In fact, one of the many advantages of smaller process geometries is their relatively lower power consumption for the same amount of computation. And the wide widths are not geometrically smaller. Wire pitch and width do not decrease steadily with gate size -- the wire size decrease is much slower than that of gate sizes.
Let me introduce you to my little friend. His name is Ohm's law:
Voltage = Current * Resistance
Now, using what you just learned, show me how lower voltages can lead to "much greater current." You can't, because it doesn't. A lower voltage always leads to lower current for the same wire resistance. And decreasing wire width does not decrease resistance (in fact it increases it a little), so that doesn't help make sense of your claim either.
Current doesn't push electrons. Current is electrons. It's a difference in voltage that "pushes" electrons. You don't "use more current" to push electrons -- if more electrons flow (by virtue of increased voltage or lower resistance), then you have more current.
The increase in heat you percieve is simply due to packing more tiny little heaters (transistors) into a smaller package with a smaller surface area. I dunno what you mean by "brownouts". Are you talking about semiconducttors or the electrical power transmission grid? Or are you thinking of electromigration (which is increasing because wires are getting thinner -- in two dimensions at the same time).
Huh? I think you got that backwards -- smaller gates require lower voltages (allow, really, since we like it when we can use lower voltages -- it saves power and makes switching faster.)
If you think about it a little, old (big) chips were 5V (remember that?), then 3.3V hit around the PCI era (in those days, I/O voltage and internal voltage we usually the same.) Then 2.5V (often with 3.3V on the I/O still), and 1.8V, etc. As the process geometries have shrunk, they have used lower and lower voltages.
If you still don't believe me, try applying a significantly higher voltage to one of your CPUs. That makes the transistors run better, right?:)
Google also will ban the names of certain controlled drugs as keywords in its search-related advertising.
"The effect is that those words won't appear in our advertising," said Sheryl Sandberg, vice president of global sales and operations for Google. "It won't say 'Buy Vicodin here,' " she said, citing the powerful painkiller.
Well, I don't think anyone said google doesn't have the right, but the question goes both ways -- why should they remove these sites from thier index? In search of the answer to that, I first noted who seems most interested in swaying google and others to censor search results:
"These legitimate businesses are an important but faceless part of the supply chain for these dangerous drugs," said Carmen Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which has been lobbying Google and other search engines to stop accepting advertising from rogue Web sites. "If the government is serious, it has to look at these businesses."
That's right, it's the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which represents all those who make money by selling these types of drugs the fine traditional way -- via tightly controlled distribution sysems with loads of heavy markups for both the drug developer (good) and the middle-men (maybe not as good).
Of course, in general, pharmacists add value to the system -- they advise and help people avoid dangerous drug interactions and such. That's good. But note that sometimes, some people have to take a drug forever, and they tend to learn about that drug pretty well and manage to use it responsibly and safely without a white-coated guy handing it to them every week.
Then sometimes these people learn that the drug they pay $100/week for is available elsewhere for 1/10th or less the price. Same drug. A lot less money. Should these people be allowed to buy their prescriptions online for less money? (Note that I call them "prescriptions", to be clear that I'm talking about people with valid prescriptions from real doctors (Hi Everybody!), not those who just decided they need some oxy's for the weekend (Hi Rush!)).
My medical plan at work requires me to buy prescriptions online when they will be used for more then 3 months at a time (such as wifey's birth control pills). It's faster, cheaper, and automatic. I wonder how many of these "rogue websites" are actually following the law, requiring prescriptions from real doctors, etc. I imagine it would be a nice bonus for the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy if a few of the legit online drug services took a negative hit from this effort as well.
Of course, I believe any aduly should be allowed to get pretty much any drug they want and use it anyway they want as long as they don't share with minors or try to kill someone with them (except themselves, which is fine), so this whole issue seems kind of silly to me, but it's always interesting to follow the money trail that often leads up to such "crackdowns."
OK, you didn't say yield, but the OP did, and then I did when helping him understand that the actual relationship of yield to process geometry is opposite of what he claimed. And then you interjected "the greater number of chips/wafer almost always more than compensates" in a discussion about shrinking geometried increasing yield. What, exactly, was supposed lead me to think that you were not saying:
the greater number of chips/wafer almost always more than compensates [for yeild decrease due to increased likelihood of fatal defects]?
And, if you weren't trying to say that, what were you trying to say? That cost per die would go down? That doesn't necessarily follow from migrating to a more advanced process, either. In fact, 90nm is still usually more expensive for most designs than 0.13um and in some cases 0.15um.
Moreover, the cost of manufacturing a wafer of a given size are absolutely not anything like constant. Most of the cost of manufacturing is in the investment in the fab itself and the cost of the masks. Building more advanced fabs (or modding existing ones to make more advanced technologies) is much more expensive. Making masks for smaller geometry processes is much, much more expensive! Both of these costs are paid for by the cost of the dice made.
BTW, note that your example cited an expected rather than actual die size reduction. I'll bet the actual wasn't even close. Those numbers came from a marketdroid spewing self-aggrandizing estimates, not the guy who hastoimplement it (i.e, me).
Finally, most fabs are shifting to larger wafers along with the switch to 90nm, so we don't even have a constant wafer size here:)
Huh? Do you know what yield is in this context? (Hint: it's not the same as in recipes). It's not how many they can make, it's how many that work out of all they make.
Yield = (number of working dice) / (total number of dice manufactured)
Making more total dice does not increase your yield. You must improve the ratio of working to failing dice in order to increase yield.
Also important, recipe-style yield (total output) doesn't go up as you suggest either because, as I mentioned before, die size for a given design does not scale with gate size as you think it might. Wires in 90nm processes are not 1/2 the pitch of wires in 0.18um processes. It's more like a 25-30% reduction, and no matter how small your gates are, you still need the same number of wires (and the die area that does with it) to connect them. It's about time mfgr's started quoting wiring pitch along with gate size (some do) -- this might help avoid confusion from over simplifications such as yours.
More memory (>4GB) and more computations done per clock cycle (i.e. more perfomance per GHz).
If this doesn't excite you, then youdon't need 64-but computing. Many people don't, you may be one of them -- that's OK, just please sit quietly and wait until the rest of us come up with enough memory-hogging apps to fix that for ya;)
Why is that? Generally smaller geometries result in lower yields. It's worse when the process is first rolled out, and yield does improve as a process matures (which 90nm has by no means done yet), but in general, a larger geometry process results in higher yields.
If you care, this is because defect densities in the silicon remain relatively constant, and although die sizes may be reduced somewhat with smaller geometries (not as much as you would think, though, due to wiring density not scaling linearly with gate size), the odds of a defect being fatal (i.e., falling into one of the increasingly dense "wrong spots" on the silicon) increase exponentially with gate size decrease.
Thanks for the links (first one especially). But, I guess you've read it yourself and know that no proof is contained therein (nor in any of its references, nor in any paper on the subject I found at citeseer) -- this paper is a "brief review of the approach, techniques, and results [for establishing a theory of thermodynamics of computation]." The full paper will be published "elsewhere" (do you have it or a link?).
As much as I'd love to read the full paper, I do not believe it will support (much less prove) your assertions that (1) very low (~kT) power computation requires logically reversible computing, (2) "reversible computing is an information theoretic problem... constrained by the second law of thermodynamics and Shannon's Law of per-bit efficiency," or (3) "the information theory and logic level of description [is] where reversible computing must be implemented."
(1) is what you initially disagred with me on. (2) is sort of a tautology -- everything, technically, is constrained by those two well-known theorems, but if (1) is not shown to be true, then (2) is tautological at best, irrelevant at worst. And (3) is sort of a re-statement of (1). I am still unconvinced, as you have yet to provide the necessary proof. In fact, after considerable research, I now confidently assert that no such proof exists.
Note that the paper you linked to attempts an axiomatic development of this theory. (As you know, that means "taken for granted without formal proof" or "derived from axioms, or theorems that are believed to be true but remain unproven"). This is an important point that should not be ignored.
Moreover, one of the axioms on which the paper relies (heavily) is Landauer's 1960 conclusion that "it is only logically ireversible operations that must dissipate energy." Note that this conclusion does say (but not prove) that
"if it must dissipate energy then it must be a logically irreversible operation."
However, and this is key, the converse is not necessarily true (and is certainly not proven in any way, by any one)! Even if you take Landauer's conclusion as axiomatically valid, as the paper's authors seem to, you still may not conclude that
"if it is a logically irreversible computation then it must dissipate energy."
That seems awfully credulous of you, unless you have access to some proof that I haven't yet seen (and I've been looking -- it's my industry too, BTW). Assuming you're not just blindly repeating something someone told you, can you point me to a rigorous proof of your claims, or provide a basic outline of the proof so that I may investigate further?
That's the original agreement, yes. But, if it works out, it will be the "national standard system desktop" for a long time to come, so I'd imagine the installed base numbers will asymptotically approach 1.3B as China becomes more technologically advanced and it spread to more people (though admittedly likely to stay well under 100% forever, but still . . . ).
That's really the bonus beauty of this deal -- they're tapping the new upcoming market segment as it develops! They're not cutting into thier own market with this, rather depriving the competition of entering the fastest growing market in the world!
I think this is appropriate here: bwahahahAHAHAHA!:)
You make an excellent point. But what if the law said that only the party that files the lawsuit is required to pay their opponent's legal fees if they lose? This seems like a pretty good way to discourage frivolous lawsuits.
Of course, that might also make the little guy less likely to file a lawsuit against a big company that wronged them (negligence, unsafe products, etc.), but this might be mitigated with a cap on the amount that the filing party has to pay.
IMHO, the best solution would be to actually enforce the existing laws that require parties to pay for thier opponent's legal fees in the case of frivolous lawsuits. The problem here is that it relies on a judge's interpretation of whether a suit is frivolous or not, and in my experience this turns out to be almost never. Maybe some standards could be put in place that define this more objectively?
Clearly this issue is a big problem, but it is not an easy problem to fix with legislation. It's critical that we balance the ability of little guys to sue huge conglomorates without fear (when warranted), yet strongly discourage stupid lawsuits. It's a hard nut to crack, and I don't know of any country that does it well. I've heard some claim that England has a good system, but IMHO that one is weighted unfairly against the little guy, though it does certainly discourage (almost all) lawsuits.
They sure do, IMHO, but it's not going to happen unless they find a spine and use it. Has anyone else checked the fatwallet forums and noted that the "Hopefully FatWallet will stand up for themselves again..." doesn't seem to be happening? Heck, seems to me that Tim from Fatwallet has folded faster than Superman on laundry day, to wit:
Here's FW's current position:
Message from the FatWallet, inc.
At approximately 11PM CST on 11/14/03, We became aware of a D.M.C.A. notification and subpoena from what appears to be the legal firm representing Best Buy Enterprise Services, Inc. (The email appears to have been sent at 5:20PM)
Due to the late hour and legal counsel not being immediately available, we are taking the action to remove the content we believe the notification is referring to. We ask that FatWallet members do not post further information regarding this matter or links to third party sites containing the information. Under the terms of the D.M.C.A., we will have an obligation to remove such information as we become aware of it.
We will follow up with legal counsel and take further action as appropriate.
Thank you in advance for your patience, cooperation and understanding.
Tim Storm
President
FatWallet, inc
What does the unavailability of counsel have to do with anything, other than as a weak excuse to cave instantly? I mean, it's the same thing as last year, and it's the same DMCA, yet there are thirty-five (35) instances of "content removed" in that thread alone. More in others. Even links to other sites with the balls to keep the info up are being removed!
FYI, some of the deals sites with spines (so far!) include: slickdeals, Anandtech's hotdeal forum, and Dealcatcher. I've posted the "offending info" in as many places as I can and will continue to do so in hopes that increasing the number of potential defendants will increase the odds that one of them sticks up for sanity in this.
Did I misunderstand, or did you just say that drugs are definitely bad, while violence only maybe bad?
That seems wierd to me, though I'm really not trying to flame you for it. I wonder where sex fits in? Always bad? Maybe bad? Never bad? Good, even? I'm genuinely curious.
Seriously, is anyone making money off of media players? Divx has the free ad version (and hacked versions galore), Quicktime -- also free unless you "go pro" (which, annoyingly, you are offered the chance to do on every start-up), WinAMP -- similarly free with a "special" version I've never seen anyone with, and RealPlayer, well, bleh.
Does anyone have any stats on actual sales of media player software? I'm guessing it's negligibly small.
Of course, one might argue that this is because MS included WMP in windows. But then I might then cry that I can't sell my kewl "dir" program because it's included in DOS/Win.
I know you didn't make it up. That's why I pointed out that you're using it without thinking it through, like the other people that use it.
If you knew I didn't make it up, then you were familiar with it. So, you were feigning confusion to be contrarian and difficult. Rather than (try to) absorb my salient point, you chose to try your hand at pedantism, and ended up looking like a fool yourself.
And no, I'm not offended by its use, it's just that "Xtian" is an unwise construction. Which was my point. "Christian" avoids the problem of people not getting it, and it avoids looking like a fool because of the superfulous T. All for the low, low cost of typing a mere twelve extra letters in your original post -- an economy wasted by the necessity of your clarification anyway. The very dfinition of a foolish economy.
When you can understand the lack of wisdom in your own lame assault (and, accordingly, refrain from this sort of contrived antagonism), I'll start considering your evaluation of the wisdom of the constructs I choose to use. I assume you meant superfluous, and it's not at all that since pronouncing Xian is relatively annoying and all but the most asinine folks have no problem understanding it, extra 'T' or not. Moreover, if you understood a whit of the original language and characters involved, you'd understand that there indeed is no "superfulous T" at all. Most importantly, there is no problem here, other than you.
The FAQ entry itself suggests it is worthwhile to note that for some, even with the historical basis, the term remains offensive and those wishing to avoid offending those bothered by terms such as these might consider choosing alternate phrases. Your familiarity with the FAQ would thus suggest you were familiar with those clauses, and thus gives the impression that you prefered potentially giving offense to merely typing four extra letters. Since only a fool give offense unnecessarily, it again makes you look like a fool.
Hmm, so here you are, faking misunderstanding to complain -- sort of offensive. And definitely unnecessary. Hello, hypocritical fool. Anyway, I looked it up in google after you whin^H^H^H^Hcomplained. I was not familiar with it until your (contrived and feigned) confusion prompted me to do so. I actually began to wonder if there were others on the net who might be as dense or annoying as you. Turns out you're the only asshat on the whole interenet who has bothered to waste time complaining about such an innocuous issue. In retrospect, my only regret is that I wasted this much time on your inanity.
Finally, yeah, a lot of Christians can be touchy. What that has to do with my comment or me (given that I'm an atheist) is rather vague. So did you jump to a premature conclusion about my beliefs, or did you just throw in a gratuitous offensive comment about Christians?
Whether or not you are one, you're as touchy as the worst I've met.
If the fomer, you look foolish; if the latter, you undermine your claim that you weren't trying to be derisive, which is stupid. Either way, it doesn't seem very bright.
I take it as a great compliment that an ignorant wannabe-pedant such as yourself would consider my post to not be very bright. That means the clueful among us were graced with a fabulously insightful comment chock full of interesting goodness. Just as I suspected; thanks for the confirmation. And please, do us all a favor and go fuck yourself -- all future whining from you will be ignored.
Sorry for the typo, but you seem to have figured it out anyway, except for your contrived (or somewhat derisive?) complaint about the double-t. Anyway, lighten up a bit -- no derision was intended. It's an abbreviation. And I didn't make it up -- it's fairly common.
Note that even religious types sometimes use this abbreviation. Scan the google results and you'll see about 20k instances, not counting people with the name of alias "Xtian."
But, I suppose this FAQ entry for "Someone used the term Xtian, and I'm offended. What should I do?" might be more suitable for you:
Start by learning the history of term, to understand that there was likely no offense intended. X is an abbreviation for Christ, arising from the Greek term Christos, which starts with a Greek Chi, written as X. This usage dates back to the 1500s. Thus, the usage is not an attempt to "blot out" the name, or be offensive.
No, that was so long ago, and more importantly from a non-Xtian culture, so the death-fearing crowd aren't so worried about it. But this story is about an early (Xtian) American corpse, so the Xtians will cry "let him rest in peace" and have "respect for the dead" (silliest. idea. ever.) until we all either recoil in disgust and confusion, or just laugh ourselves silly at just how afraid of death Xtians are. Ironic, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
We're not talking about that problem, we're talking about this patently false statement made by the GP:
We may be getting smaller, but as this happens we'll need higher voltages to force things to happen on that level.
I understand the problems facing the continued shrinking of transistors, as clearly you do, but the poster to whom I replied definitely doesn't. In fact, he's nearly completely opposite of correct, and even a basic layman's understanding of electronics usually prevents such completely backwards confusion. Something like the following would make much more sense, be correct, and capture some of the points of the article:
We may be getting smaller, but as this happens we'll need lower voltages to prevent things from happening unless we want them to.
You made the same point that I made when trying to help the GP reverse (and correct) his understanding: smaller geometries require lower voltages. You said:
If traces are 20 nanometres apart (0.02 micron), it only takes 0.4 volts to short the chip.
Now compare your (sane) statement above with this:
We may be getting smaller, but as this happens we'll need higher voltages to force things to happen on that level.
There is no way to reconcile these two. One is wrong, one is right. Hint: you're not wrong.
The total current per transistor required has done nothing like skyrocket; in fact it has decreased significantly. The total current used by a CPU is higher because there are more transistors on the die (and the CPU can do more in less time.) In fact, one of the many advantages of smaller process geometries is their relatively lower power consumption for the same amount of computation. And the wide widths are not geometrically smaller. Wire pitch and width do not decrease steadily with gate size -- the wire size decrease is much slower than that of gate sizes.
Let me introduce you to my little friend. His name is Ohm's law:
Voltage = Current * Resistance
Now, using what you just learned, show me how lower voltages can lead to "much greater current." You can't, because it doesn't. A lower voltage always leads to lower current for the same wire resistance. And decreasing wire width does not decrease resistance (in fact it increases it a little), so that doesn't help make sense of your claim either.
Current doesn't push electrons. Current is electrons. It's a difference in voltage that "pushes" electrons. You don't "use more current" to push electrons -- if more electrons flow (by virtue of increased voltage or lower resistance), then you have more current.
The increase in heat you percieve is simply due to packing more tiny little heaters (transistors) into a smaller package with a smaller surface area. I dunno what you mean by "brownouts". Are you talking about semiconducttors or the electrical power transmission grid? Or are you thinking of electromigration (which is increasing because wires are getting thinner -- in two dimensions at the same time).
Huh? I think you got that backwards -- smaller gates require lower voltages (allow, really, since we like it when we can use lower voltages -- it saves power and makes switching faster.)
:)
If you think about it a little, old (big) chips were 5V (remember that?), then 3.3V hit around the PCI era (in those days, I/O voltage and internal voltage we usually the same.) Then 2.5V (often with 3.3V on the I/O still), and 1.8V, etc. As the process geometries have shrunk, they have used lower and lower voltages.
If you still don't believe me, try applying a significantly higher voltage to one of your CPUs. That makes the transistors run better, right?
This is not insightful, it is wrong. RTFA:
Google also will ban the names of certain controlled drugs as keywords in its search-related advertising.
"The effect is that those words won't appear in our advertising," said Sheryl Sandberg, vice president of global sales and operations for Google. "It won't say 'Buy Vicodin here,' " she said, citing the powerful painkiller.
Well, I don't think anyone said google doesn't have the right, but the question goes both ways -- why should they remove these sites from thier index? In search of the answer to that, I first noted who seems most interested in swaying google and others to censor search results:
"These legitimate businesses are an important but faceless part of the supply chain for these dangerous drugs," said Carmen Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which has been lobbying Google and other search engines to stop accepting advertising from rogue Web sites. "If the government is serious, it has to look at these businesses."
That's right, it's the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which represents all those who make money by selling these types of drugs the fine traditional way -- via tightly controlled distribution sysems with loads of heavy markups for both the drug developer (good) and the middle-men (maybe not as good).
Of course, in general, pharmacists add value to the system -- they advise and help people avoid dangerous drug interactions and such. That's good. But note that sometimes, some people have to take a drug forever, and they tend to learn about that drug pretty well and manage to use it responsibly and safely without a white-coated guy handing it to them every week.
Then sometimes these people learn that the drug they pay $100/week for is available elsewhere for 1/10th or less the price. Same drug. A lot less money. Should these people be allowed to buy their prescriptions online for less money? (Note that I call them "prescriptions", to be clear that I'm talking about people with valid prescriptions from real doctors (Hi Everybody!), not those who just decided they need some oxy's for the weekend (Hi Rush!)).
My medical plan at work requires me to buy prescriptions online when they will be used for more then 3 months at a time (such as wifey's birth control pills). It's faster, cheaper, and automatic. I wonder how many of these "rogue websites" are actually following the law, requiring prescriptions from real doctors, etc. I imagine it would be a nice bonus for the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy if a few of the legit online drug services took a negative hit from this effort as well.
Of course, I believe any aduly should be allowed to get pretty much any drug they want and use it anyway they want as long as they don't share with minors or try to kill someone with them (except themselves, which is fine), so this whole issue seems kind of silly to me, but it's always interesting to follow the money trail that often leads up to such "crackdowns."
Thanks! I was trying to figure out what it means to turn out "in the wanken" (from the Babelfish translation):
The argument, the European satellite navigation system Galileo makes the Europeans independent of the USA, seems in the wanken to turn out.
Now I know it means "to tumble". I think I prefer to say "turns out in the wanken".
OK, you didn't say yield, but the OP did, and then I did when helping him understand that the actual relationship of yield to process geometry is opposite of what he claimed. And then you interjected "the greater number of chips/wafer almost always more than compensates" in a discussion about shrinking geometried increasing yield. What, exactly, was supposed lead me to think that you were not saying:
:)
the greater number of chips/wafer almost always more than compensates [for yeild decrease due to increased likelihood of fatal defects]?
And, if you weren't trying to say that, what were you trying to say? That cost per die would go down? That doesn't necessarily follow from migrating to a more advanced process, either. In fact, 90nm is still usually more expensive for most designs than 0.13um and in some cases 0.15um.
Moreover, the cost of manufacturing a wafer of a given size are absolutely not anything like constant. Most of the cost of manufacturing is in the investment in the fab itself and the cost of the masks. Building more advanced fabs (or modding existing ones to make more advanced technologies) is much more expensive. Making masks for smaller geometry processes is much, much more expensive! Both of these costs are paid for by the cost of the dice made.
BTW, note that your example cited an expected rather than actual die size reduction. I'll bet the actual wasn't even close. Those numbers came from a marketdroid spewing self-aggrandizing estimates, not the guy who hastoimplement it (i.e, me).
Finally, most fabs are shifting to larger wafers along with the switch to 90nm, so we don't even have a constant wafer size here
Huh? Do you know what yield is in this context? (Hint: it's not the same as in recipes). It's not how many they can make, it's how many that work out of all they make.
Yield = (number of working dice) / (total number of dice manufactured)
Making more total dice does not increase your yield. You must improve the ratio of working to failing dice in order to increase yield.
Also important, recipe-style yield (total output) doesn't go up as you suggest either because, as I mentioned before, die size for a given design does not scale with gate size as you think it might. Wires in 90nm processes are not 1/2 the pitch of wires in 0.18um processes. It's more like a 25-30% reduction, and no matter how small your gates are, you still need the same number of wires (and the die area that does with it) to connect them. It's about time mfgr's started quoting wiring pitch along with gate size (some do) -- this might help avoid confusion from over simplifications such as yours.
More memory (>4GB) and more computations done per clock cycle (i.e. more perfomance per GHz).
;)
If this doesn't excite you, then you don't need 64-but computing. Many people don't, you may be one of them -- that's OK, just please sit quietly and wait until the rest of us come up with enough memory-hogging apps to fix that for ya
Why is that? Generally smaller geometries result in lower yields. It's worse when the process is first rolled out, and yield does improve as a process matures (which 90nm has by no means done yet), but in general, a larger geometry process results in higher yields.
If you care, this is because defect densities in the silicon remain relatively constant, and although die sizes may be reduced somewhat with smaller geometries (not as much as you would think, though, due to wiring density not scaling linearly with gate size), the odds of a defect being fatal (i.e., falling into one of the increasingly dense "wrong spots" on the silicon) increase exponentially with gate size decrease.
Thanks for the links (first one especially). But, I guess you've read it yourself and know that no proof is contained therein (nor in any of its references, nor in any paper on the subject I found at citeseer) -- this paper is a "brief review of the approach, techniques, and results [for establishing a theory of thermodynamics of computation]." The full paper will be published "elsewhere" (do you have it or a link?).
... constrained by the second law of thermodynamics and Shannon's Law of per-bit efficiency," or (3) "the information theory and logic level of description [is] where reversible computing must be implemented."
...which was your original claim.
As much as I'd love to read the full paper, I do not believe it will support (much less prove) your assertions that (1) very low (~kT) power computation requires logically reversible computing, (2) "reversible computing is an information theoretic problem
(1) is what you initially disagred with me on. (2) is sort of a tautology -- everything, technically, is constrained by those two well-known theorems, but if (1) is not shown to be true, then (2) is tautological at best, irrelevant at worst. And (3) is sort of a re-statement of (1). I am still unconvinced, as you have yet to provide the necessary proof. In fact, after considerable research, I now confidently assert that no such proof exists.
Note that the paper you linked to attempts an axiomatic development of this theory. (As you know, that means "taken for granted without formal proof" or "derived from axioms, or theorems that are believed to be true but remain unproven"). This is an important point that should not be ignored.
Moreover, one of the axioms on which the paper relies (heavily) is Landauer's 1960 conclusion that "it is only logically ireversible operations that must dissipate energy." Note that this conclusion does say (but not prove) that
"if it must dissipate energy then it must be a logically irreversible operation."
However, and this is key, the converse is not necessarily true (and is certainly not proven in any way, by any one)! Even if you take Landauer's conclusion as axiomatically valid, as the paper's authors seem to, you still may not conclude that
"if it is a logically irreversible computation then it must dissipate energy."
QED
That seems awfully credulous of you, unless you have access to some proof that I haven't yet seen (and I've been looking -- it's my industry too, BTW). Assuming you're not just blindly repeating something someone told you, can you point me to a rigorous proof of your claims, or provide a basic outline of the proof so that I may investigate further?
Thanks in advance.
No, it's real. The link to epson's site shows a photo of an actual device. The linked photo is for chekcing out the various parts.
So, my questions: where can I buy one and how much?
OK, so what do you call 200 million (which is what this story is about)?
That's the original agreement, yes. But, if it works out, it will be the "national standard system desktop" for a long time to come, so I'd imagine the installed base numbers will asymptotically approach 1.3B as China becomes more technologically advanced and it spread to more people (though admittedly likely to stay well under 100% forever, but still . . . ).
:)
That's really the bonus beauty of this deal -- they're tapping the new upcoming market segment as it develops! They're not cutting into thier own market with this, rather depriving the competition of entering the fastest growing market in the world!
I think this is appropriate here: bwahahahAHAHAHA!
Eh? Because it's China! They have to have a "nationwide standard" everything! .
:) ).
Not that there's anything wrong with that. (But there is
What does the Sun Desktop have which Mandrake doesn't (besides star office).
Enterprise-class support, relieability, acessibility, and (though perhaps irrelevant in this case) scalability.
You make an excellent point. But what if the law said that only the party that files the lawsuit is required to pay their opponent's legal fees if they lose? This seems like a pretty good way to discourage frivolous lawsuits.
Of course, that might also make the little guy less likely to file a lawsuit against a big company that wronged them (negligence, unsafe products, etc.), but this might be mitigated with a cap on the amount that the filing party has to pay.
IMHO, the best solution would be to actually enforce the existing laws that require parties to pay for thier opponent's legal fees in the case of frivolous lawsuits. The problem here is that it relies on a judge's interpretation of whether a suit is frivolous or not, and in my experience this turns out to be almost never. Maybe some standards could be put in place that define this more objectively?
Clearly this issue is a big problem, but it is not an easy problem to fix with legislation. It's critical that we balance the ability of little guys to sue huge conglomorates without fear (when warranted), yet strongly discourage stupid lawsuits. It's a hard nut to crack, and I don't know of any country that does it well. I've heard some claim that England has a good system, but IMHO that one is weighted unfairly against the little guy, though it does certainly discourage (almost all) lawsuits.
They sure do, IMHO, but it's not going to happen unless they find a spine and use it. Has anyone else checked the fatwallet forums and noted that the "Hopefully FatWallet will stand up for themselves again..." doesn't seem to be happening? Heck, seems to me that Tim from Fatwallet has folded faster than Superman on laundry day, to wit:
Here's FW's current position:
Message from the FatWallet, inc.
At approximately 11PM CST on 11/14/03, We became aware of a D.M.C.A. notification and subpoena from what appears to be the legal firm representing Best Buy Enterprise Services, Inc. (The email appears to have been sent at 5:20PM)
Due to the late hour and legal counsel not being immediately available, we are taking the action to remove the content we believe the notification is referring to. We ask that FatWallet members do not post further information regarding this matter or links to third party sites containing the information. Under the terms of the D.M.C.A., we will have an obligation to remove such information as we become aware of it.
We will follow up with legal counsel and take further action as appropriate.
Thank you in advance for your patience, cooperation and understanding.
Tim Storm
President
FatWallet, inc
What does the unavailability of counsel have to do with anything, other than as a weak excuse to cave instantly? I mean, it's the same thing as last year, and it's the same DMCA, yet there are thirty-five (35) instances of "content removed" in that thread alone. More in others. Even links to other sites with the balls to keep the info up are being removed!
FYI, some of the deals sites with spines (so far!) include: slickdeals, Anandtech's hotdeal forum, and Dealcatcher. I've posted the "offending info" in as many places as I can and will continue to do so in hopes that increasing the number of potential defendants will increase the odds that one of them sticks up for sanity in this.
something bad (drugs or maybe violance)
Did I misunderstand, or did you just say that drugs are definitely bad, while violence only maybe bad?
That seems wierd to me, though I'm really not trying to flame you for it. I wonder where sex fits in? Always bad? Maybe bad? Never bad? Good, even? I'm genuinely curious.
What "media player market?"
Seriously, is anyone making money off of media players? Divx has the free ad version (and hacked versions galore), Quicktime -- also free unless you "go pro" (which, annoyingly, you are offered the chance to do on every start-up), WinAMP -- similarly free with a "special" version I've never seen anyone with, and RealPlayer, well, bleh.
Does anyone have any stats on actual sales of media player software? I'm guessing it's negligibly small.
Of course, one might argue that this is because MS included WMP in windows. But then I might then cry that I can't sell my kewl "dir" program because it's included in DOS/Win.
I know you didn't make it up. That's why I pointed out that you're using it without thinking it through, like the other people that use it.
If you knew I didn't make it up, then you were familiar with it. So, you were feigning confusion to be contrarian and difficult. Rather than (try to) absorb my salient point, you chose to try your hand at pedantism, and ended up looking like a fool yourself.
And no, I'm not offended by its use, it's just that "Xtian" is an unwise construction. Which was my point. "Christian" avoids the problem of people not getting it, and it avoids looking like a fool because of the superfulous T. All for the low, low cost of typing a mere twelve extra letters in your original post -- an economy wasted by the necessity of your clarification anyway. The very dfinition of a foolish economy.
When you can understand the lack of wisdom in your own lame assault (and, accordingly, refrain from this sort of contrived antagonism), I'll start considering your evaluation of the wisdom of the constructs I choose to use. I assume you meant superfluous, and it's not at all that since pronouncing Xian is relatively annoying and all but the most asinine folks have no problem understanding it, extra 'T' or not. Moreover, if you understood a whit of the original language and characters involved, you'd understand that there indeed is no "superfulous T" at all. Most importantly, there is no problem here, other than you.
The FAQ entry itself suggests it is worthwhile to note that for some, even with the historical basis, the term remains offensive and those wishing to avoid offending those bothered by terms such as these might consider choosing alternate phrases. Your familiarity with the FAQ would thus suggest you were familiar with those clauses, and thus gives the impression that you prefered potentially giving offense to merely typing four extra letters. Since only a fool give offense unnecessarily, it again makes you look like a fool.
Hmm, so here you are, faking misunderstanding to complain -- sort of offensive. And definitely unnecessary. Hello, hypocritical fool. Anyway, I looked it up in google after you whin^H^H^H^Hcomplained. I was not familiar with it until your (contrived and feigned) confusion prompted me to do so. I actually began to wonder if there were others on the net who might be as dense or annoying as you. Turns out you're the only asshat on the whole interenet who has bothered to waste time complaining about such an innocuous issue. In retrospect, my only regret is that I wasted this much time on your inanity.
Finally, yeah, a lot of Christians can be touchy. What that has to do with my comment or me (given that I'm an atheist) is rather vague. So did you jump to a premature conclusion about my beliefs, or did you just throw in a gratuitous offensive comment about Christians?
Whether or not you are one, you're as touchy as the worst I've met.
If the fomer, you look foolish; if the latter, you undermine your claim that you weren't trying to be derisive, which is stupid. Either way, it doesn't seem very bright.
I take it as a great compliment that an ignorant wannabe-pedant such as yourself would consider my post to not be very bright. That means the clueful among us were graced with a fabulously insightful comment chock full of interesting goodness. Just as I suspected; thanks for the confirmation. And please, do us all a favor and go fuck yourself -- all future whining from you will be ignored.
Sorry for the typo, but you seem to have figured it out anyway, except for your contrived (or somewhat derisive?) complaint about the double-t. Anyway, lighten up a bit -- no derision was intended. It's an abbreviation. And I didn't make it up -- it's fairly common.
Note that even religious types sometimes use this abbreviation. Scan the google results and you'll see about 20k instances, not counting people with the name of alias "Xtian."
But, I suppose this FAQ entry for "Someone used the term Xtian, and I'm offended. What should I do?" might be more suitable for you:
Start by learning the history of term, to understand that there was likely no offense intended. X is an abbreviation for Christ, arising from the Greek term Christos, which starts with a Greek Chi, written as X. This usage dates back to the 1500s. Thus, the usage is not an attempt to "blot out" the name, or be offensive.
Xtians can be so touchy.
You're kidding, right? Here's a hint. Chistmas == Xmas.
No, that was so long ago, and more importantly from a non-Xtian culture, so the death-fearing crowd aren't so worried about it. But this story is about an early (Xtian) American corpse, so the Xtians will cry "let him rest in peace" and have "respect for the dead" (silliest. idea. ever.) until we all either recoil in disgust and confusion, or just laugh ourselves silly at just how afraid of death Xtians are. Ironic, isn't it?