It used to be that "nano" was the latest buzzword in materials research, so that anyone doing nano-stuff got funded because it sounded new and edgy. Maybe "green" is going to be the next one? Really what matters is cost - this could make things cheaper. The semiconductor industry doesn't care about being green. I detect more than a whiff of media-targeted spin in this research.
People are throwing money at nano-this and nano-that because it has great PR, but nothing as yet has come remotely close to being a credible alternative to silicon CMOS for ULSI devices. Consider where silicon CMOS is at the moment - we can put a billion transistors all together on the same logic chip for tens of dollars. A bit of DRAM costs less than a billionth of a dollar. This is what we can do now - think how much further it will have gone in 15 years, when the new nano-stuff is supposed to be competing. Any new technology will have to be considerably better than what is already available for anyone to invest in it, and looking at the current state of things it's just not going to happen. They are banking on miracle breakthroughs.
There is also a credibility issue with manufacture and interconnect. It's one thing to make one super-fast nanotube transistor and say "ooh, look how good it is!" But it's quite another to be able to put a trillion of them on the same chip, all wired together, for cheaper than CMOS. That is what they are going to have to do to compete with where silicon will be in 15-20 years. To be fair, the guy in the article seems well aware of this.
Re:SIlence is a pipe dream for me
on
A Silent PC Solution?
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· Score: 5, Informative
have you checked the PSU? it will have a fan or two in there to cool it down, that could be the "phantom noise". i'd imagine it's possible to get hold of a quiet/silent one from somewhere or other.
Have a look at MEMC's website (www.memc.com), they produce silicon wafers like the ones in the article. The site has some nice pics and animations of their manufacturing process.
The only game i've been playing for more than two years now is world war 2 online (www.wwiionline.com). The game is constanly updated and has really come into its own this year. It is a massively multiplayer online war simulation, with thousands of players fighting it out on a single, continuous map spanning hundreds of miles. It has everything - tanks, planes, infantry, naval vessels, you name it; and all in a world with the most detailed physics model yet attempted. If you're tired of the gaminess of BF42, MOH:AA etc and you want a war game done properly, check out wwiiol. The game is AWESOME.
My mistake, it was 2x100 ddr ram. Yes I am a fool:). The reason he did it was so that he could fill up his graphs with low-scoring A64 results, so if you're just glancing through (as most people do), you see the one P4EE result at the top and a bunch of A64 results lower down. There is no legitimate reason to benchmark a new processor with memory this slow.
agreed. it's ridiculous for the entire space program to grind to a halt every time there's an accident. it's a dangerous business, i'm sure all the astronauts accept that.
Anyone who knows about this stuff will tell you that Tom's is notoriously biased. It can be shocking. He has been caught out on numerous occasions - photoshopping pictures of cpus, reviewing certain components on crippled test rigs, swapping colours over on his graphs without telling the reader; you name it, he's done it. On his original A64 vs P4EE review he even benchmarked the A64 with three year old 100mhz SDRAM.
Unfortunately, hardware newbies (including/. it seems) don't realise this and take what he writes as gospel. I've lost count of the number of innocents i've seen who have bought second-rate hardware on the basis of a THG review. At the moment he is pro-intel, and slightly pro-nvidia for graphics although this is less marked.
Slashdot Mirror
It used to be that "nano" was the latest buzzword in materials research, so that anyone doing nano-stuff got funded because it sounded new and edgy. Maybe "green" is going to be the next one? Really what matters is cost - this could make things cheaper. The semiconductor industry doesn't care about being green. I detect more than a whiff of media-targeted spin in this research.
People are throwing money at nano-this and nano-that because it has great PR, but nothing as yet has come remotely close to being a credible alternative to silicon CMOS for ULSI devices. Consider where silicon CMOS is at the moment - we can put a billion transistors all together on the same logic chip for tens of dollars. A bit of DRAM costs less than a billionth of a dollar. This is what we can do now - think how much further it will have gone in 15 years, when the new nano-stuff is supposed to be competing. Any new technology will have to be considerably better than what is already available for anyone to invest in it, and looking at the current state of things it's just not going to happen. They are banking on miracle breakthroughs. There is also a credibility issue with manufacture and interconnect. It's one thing to make one super-fast nanotube transistor and say "ooh, look how good it is!" But it's quite another to be able to put a trillion of them on the same chip, all wired together, for cheaper than CMOS. That is what they are going to have to do to compete with where silicon will be in 15-20 years. To be fair, the guy in the article seems well aware of this.
have you checked the PSU? it will have a fan or two in there to cool it down, that could be the "phantom noise". i'd imagine it's possible to get hold of a quiet/silent one from somewhere or other.
Have a look at MEMC's website (www.memc.com), they produce silicon wafers like the ones in the article. The site has some nice pics and animations of their manufacturing process.
The only game i've been playing for more than two years now is world war 2 online (www.wwiionline.com). The game is constanly updated and has really come into its own this year. It is a massively multiplayer online war simulation, with thousands of players fighting it out on a single, continuous map spanning hundreds of miles. It has everything - tanks, planes, infantry, naval vessels, you name it; and all in a world with the most detailed physics model yet attempted. If you're tired of the gaminess of BF42, MOH:AA etc and you want a war game done properly, check out wwiiol. The game is AWESOME.
My mistake, it was 2x100 ddr ram. Yes I am a fool :). The reason he did it was so that he could fill up his graphs with low-scoring A64 results, so if you're just glancing through (as most people do), you see the one P4EE result at the top and a bunch of A64 results lower down. There is no legitimate reason to benchmark a new processor with memory this slow.
agreed. it's ridiculous for the entire space program to grind to a halt every time there's an accident. it's a dangerous business, i'm sure all the astronauts accept that.
Anyone who knows about this stuff will tell you that Tom's is notoriously biased. It can be shocking. He has been caught out on numerous occasions - photoshopping pictures of cpus, reviewing certain components on crippled test rigs, swapping colours over on his graphs without telling the reader; you name it, he's done it. On his original A64 vs P4EE review he even benchmarked the A64 with three year old 100mhz SDRAM. Unfortunately, hardware newbies (including /. it seems) don't realise this and take what he writes as gospel. I've lost count of the number of innocents i've seen who have bought second-rate hardware on the basis of a THG review. At the moment he is pro-intel, and slightly pro-nvidia for graphics although this is less marked.