Funny, this is actually what Intel's doing. Nehalem is built on scalable cores that can be stitched together to form massive processing arrays. Imagine something very much like ARM cores today but with an improved system interconnect. Start thinking tiles instead of cores. Start thinking routing instead of system bus. Start thinking FPGA-fabric like devices instead of SoC's.
I think you mean Gallium Arsenide and Cray tried to use it. There are some inherent disadvantages to GaAs when it comes to digital circuits. For one, there's currently no way of making a good p-type semiconductor out of it. Back before CMOS, it might have competed with silicon but just about all digital logic is CMOS and for good reason.
Heh, this is true, however, the process is not 100% efficient. With potential -> kinetic energy, the loss in energy is simply due to friction of the axles and drag. I'm not sure how efficient an energy storage device you can make that is being charged by the downhill force but I'm pretty sure it's nowhere near as efficient.
Erm, one does not need to "harness" the energy from downhill. Beside the energy lost from drag and friction from the axles, the conversion of potential to kinetic energy has no losses.
You might have a point that the increased velocity coming down the hill would produce more air drag than if the vehicle had been cruising at optimal speed. Of course, the flip side of the coin would be that there would be less air drag produced as the vehicle decelerates while going up the hill.
(hint, roller coasters don't need to be constantly accelerated even though they go up and down).
No, it does not. Air friction provides exactly the same amount of drag force (trying to slow the vehicle down) on a 2kg object as a 1kg object provided the same geometry and size. This means the exact same amount of counter-force has to be generated to counter this, regardless of the mass.
You might have a point with road friction but last I checked, greased rotating axles provided very little friction.
If there were no air friction and no friction due to the spinning axle, it would take zero energy to "maintain" momentum. Because "maintaining momentum" is nonsensical. Momentum is not lost due to an object moving, it's lost due to counter-forces. And air friction is determined by geometry,shape and current velocity, not mass.
Most if not all modern microprocessors are quite capable of sustaining more than one instruction/cycle assuming you're not doing something that is completely memory-bound. Hell, even silverthrone is 3-way superscalar (albeit in-order).
It's difficult to be violent when you're out of breathe after getting up from your chair and waddling over to the kitchen to open another jumbo bag of Doritos.
Why is that such a bad thing? So long as Skynet isn't trying to kill you, is there any issue with it making music for you? Really, I would NOT mind a Summer Glau robot making me coffee and running my errands, so long as she doesn't "terminate" a bunch of schoolchildren along the way.
He was not a prophet because he chose himself over humanity. He had the prescient ability to see the need for the Golden Path but he chose not to follow it because of his love for Chani. His son, Leto II, made that sacrifice. Prophets in almost of the various biblical notions, is one who serves to bring humanity to the right path to salvation. Hence the Judas references in God Emperor that puts Leto in the Jesus role.
I'm sorry, but last I checked, exclusive, government-granted right to produce and sell a product that's only given to a limited number of companies was not a free market.
Believe it or not, treaties are binding (albeit much less so in the Bush Administration). The U.S. has been more aggressive in pursuing its interests but if you look at the actions of Washington, it's not always in the best interest of the American people. What's more binding to the U.S. however, is not any piece of paper (just as in Dune, what really stops the factions from achieving their goals isn't superficial agreements), it's the reasons behind those treaties. Specifically, the hold the Saudi's have over U.S. politics because of our dependence on oil. Many of the actions of the U.S. in that region are definitely not in the interest of the American people and yet....they occur.
That's the allegory, that powers, even superpowers, are bound to do things that aren't good for itself or humanity.
I don't think Christianity has much in terms of merging of the feminine and the masculine.
That aside, you're reading into the minor parts that most likely to pad the story with details. The Kwizatz Haderach is simply a profit figure. It unites the Fremen to become the dominant power of the world (and quite violently so). That is very allegorical towards modern day extremist Islam.
The other theme is that the profit of the Fremen is not complete. The later books show this in that Leto II came and did away with the Fremen empire built by his father.
I agree that there are huge similarities between the Fremen and modern Islamic groups. What's funny is that Frank Herbert got the idea of the story not from the conflicts in the Middle East but from the exploitation of Africa. Diamond and oil.
One of the key points of Dune is not necessarily power or oppression but political trappings. It is much more a criticism of how the powers than be (the emperor, the navigator's guild, the bene gesserit, etc.) were all interlocked and trapped by each other in a perpetual cycle of deceit and backstabbing. None of them could accomplish anything and humanity was at a standstill destined for extinction should anything slight thing (such as the sandworms dying) interrupt their routine.
It's an allegory to the dependence on oil and the globalized politics of today. How even the U.S., being the superpower that it is, is locked into binding treaties and very restricted in terms of what it can do to help itself or the world.
I'm gonna agree that this may not turn out how they want it to. Although I'm all for throwing out the old and starting new, the sheer fact that Windows has to support not just legacy software (which can be easy to emulate, sort of) but legacy hardware as well, probably means more people will have issues with this than not.
The main advantage here is self-clocking chips with high frequency requirements. Typical low-frequency chips either can live with an external oscillator, are clocked by another control chip or aren't very frequency-dependent and use internal ring-oscillators.
This is already done. Very few microchips nowadays only operate using one clock. Internally, the main clock (or in some cases multiple main clocks) are gated or divided down to drive lower-frequency components (albeit multi-cycle paths are used more often). The case you mentioned of a critical path running too slow can be alleviated by using multi-cycle paths.
The problem, however, is that the rest of the chip still has to wait for the results from that critical path. Whether it's clocked slower, or allowed 2+ cycles to settle, the rest of the circuits still have to wait. So you could clock it up however fast you want but it's not going to change the fact that that one little critical path will halt the data flow.
CMOS is silicon-dioxide as well......or at least the substrate is.
The point here is that instead of a discrete chip using a different fabrication process, a resonator can be built on a standard CMOS process. The article is very short on details of how this thing actually works but I was under the impression that we had such a technology already. It's called a ring oscillator....
That's for RF chips and RF signals. Silicon Germanium (SiGe) is the material and the 350 GHz signal being propagated is a sine wave with the FET being kept in the linear region. Digital signals are much more difficult to get to 350 GHz.
To give you an idea, in a mixed signal BiCMOS chip where the digital components are standard CMOS and there's a SiGe layer on top for the RF circuits, the RF transistors are capable of amplifying an input sine wave all the way to the multiple tens of GHz. In the same process, the peak switching frequency for a digital signal is around maybe 5 GHz for an inverter let's say.
Digital switching has many properties that an analog signal does not. It has a knee frequency and rise/fall time requirements. It has to switch above and below the detection threshold (and regenerate the signal through each gate rather than propagate any low signal levels). Being able to have a transistor propagate a 350 GHz sine wave is orders of magnitudes easier (and possible) than having a flip-flop operate at 350 GHz using the same process technology.
And here I thought they were called "applications". And I believe they already are sold separately. And can be added/removed at whim. Hell, my Windows XP even has a friendly UI to help me keep track of, and add/remove any that I want.
1. Text books do make a difference. Pick up an edition of Steven Smith's "The Scientist & Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing" and compare it to whatever book your professor published and subsequently made you use for the course. The difference is stark. I know it was for me. This is what a lot of college students don't get. They need to do independent research instead of relying on material given to them by professors. There are so many other sources out there that do a way better job at explaining the material.
2. Other majors are inflated. Though this is an issue per se with the engineering curriculum it does offer unusually high expectations from uninformed employers. Grades for my engineering classes were what they should've been. C means you did the bare minimum but you got by with enough of the material learned. B means you tried but didn't excel at it. A means you have the stuff committed to memory like the curves of Scarlett Johanson's boobies. Not everyone's cut out to be an A student but with effort, everyone should be able to get a B. C means you're either gifted and didn't crack the book open or mediocre and didn't try too hard.
3. This is very important because it is the mentality a lot of engineering students (possibly bright ones) have come their second year. They consequently either just tough it out and graduate with very little passion for their field study or switch to other majors. The result you get is the stereotypical "math nerd" engineers who graduate able to do equations with the best of them but with the insight and broad-thinking abilities of a worker ant.
4. As a result of #3, the entire field of engineers is stereotyped and further turns away otherwise creative and talented prospective engineers (and women).
5. As a result of #4, I had to take Comparative Literature just to meet girls.
6. So yes, it's very fucking important and relevant to nerds. It is STUFF THAT MATTERS.
Interesting, so what they want to do is to be able to create larger multi-chip packages where each the chips are connected to each other optically rather than the traditional wire-bonds on a SiP. I'm honestly not seeing the advantage here in terms of speed. A single LVDS pair across a chip pad and wire-bond can already carry "tens of billions of bits per second" of bandwidth. Many can be put in parallel. I can see this being an advantage if they've discovered some ultra-efficient electro-optical conversion device that's can be etched into silicon. LVDS drivers and receivers do suck up a lot of power....
Even a directed wireless transmitter through a waveguide only manages to send a fraction of its signal power over to the receiver. There's also the problem that it's much more susceptible to interference, it drains a lot of power because RF signals are not easy to generate at high speeds, the extra logic required and the fact that the bandwidth is just nowhere near what traditional wired links are capable of might not make it all that attractive.
No, but it depends on whether or not the receiver is current-steered or voltage-steered. If it's voltage steered then it's the propagation of the electric field that carries the signal. In which case, it can be near the speed of light.
Also, future chip-to-chip interconnects seem to be moving towards transmission lines rather than treating circuit paths like bulk interconnects. Wave-pipelining the signal will mean that data transfer rates will not be hindered by the time it takes a voltage swing from transmitter to reach the receiver. Latency is still a problem, however but I imagine the electro-optical conversion process already adds plenty of that.
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Funny, this is actually what Intel's doing. Nehalem is built on scalable cores that can be stitched together to form massive processing arrays. Imagine something very much like ARM cores today but with an improved system interconnect. Start thinking tiles instead of cores. Start thinking routing instead of system bus. Start thinking FPGA-fabric like devices instead of SoC's.
I think you mean Gallium Arsenide and Cray tried to use it. There are some inherent disadvantages to GaAs when it comes to digital circuits. For one, there's currently no way of making a good p-type semiconductor out of it. Back before CMOS, it might have competed with silicon but just about all digital logic is CMOS and for good reason.
Heh, this is true, however, the process is not 100% efficient. With potential -> kinetic energy, the loss in energy is simply due to friction of the axles and drag. I'm not sure how efficient an energy storage device you can make that is being charged by the downhill force but I'm pretty sure it's nowhere near as efficient.
Erm, one does not need to "harness" the energy from downhill. Beside the energy lost from drag and friction from the axles, the conversion of potential to kinetic energy has no losses.
You might have a point that the increased velocity coming down the hill would produce more air drag than if the vehicle had been cruising at optimal speed. Of course, the flip side of the coin would be that there would be less air drag produced as the vehicle decelerates while going up the hill.
(hint, roller coasters don't need to be constantly accelerated even though they go up and down).
No, it does not. Air friction provides exactly the same amount of drag force (trying to slow the vehicle down) on a 2kg object as a 1kg object provided the same geometry and size. This means the exact same amount of counter-force has to be generated to counter this, regardless of the mass.
You might have a point with road friction but last I checked, greased rotating axles provided very little friction.
If there were no air friction and no friction due to the spinning axle, it would take zero energy to "maintain" momentum. Because "maintaining momentum" is nonsensical. Momentum is not lost due to an object moving, it's lost due to counter-forces. And air friction is determined by geometry,shape and current velocity, not mass.
Most if not all modern microprocessors are quite capable of sustaining more than one instruction/cycle assuming you're not doing something that is completely memory-bound. Hell, even silverthrone is 3-way superscalar (albeit in-order).
It's difficult to be violent when you're out of breathe after getting up from your chair and waddling over to the kitchen to open another jumbo bag of Doritos.
Why is that such a bad thing? So long as Skynet isn't trying to kill you, is there any issue with it making music for you? Really, I would NOT mind a Summer Glau robot making me coffee and running my errands, so long as she doesn't "terminate" a bunch of schoolchildren along the way.
He was not a prophet because he chose himself over humanity. He had the prescient ability to see the need for the Golden Path but he chose not to follow it because of his love for Chani. His son, Leto II, made that sacrifice. Prophets in almost of the various biblical notions, is one who serves to bring humanity to the right path to salvation. Hence the Judas references in God Emperor that puts Leto in the Jesus role.
I'm sorry, but last I checked, exclusive, government-granted right to produce and sell a product that's only given to a limited number of companies was not a free market.
hehe, you give me too much credit, I meant "prophet" although by all rights, he wasn't.
Believe it or not, treaties are binding (albeit much less so in the Bush Administration). The U.S. has been more aggressive in pursuing its interests but if you look at the actions of Washington, it's not always in the best interest of the American people. What's more binding to the U.S. however, is not any piece of paper (just as in Dune, what really stops the factions from achieving their goals isn't superficial agreements), it's the reasons behind those treaties. Specifically, the hold the Saudi's have over U.S. politics because of our dependence on oil. Many of the actions of the U.S. in that region are definitely not in the interest of the American people and yet....they occur.
That's the allegory, that powers, even superpowers, are bound to do things that aren't good for itself or humanity.
I don't think Christianity has much in terms of merging of the feminine and the masculine.
That aside, you're reading into the minor parts that most likely to pad the story with details. The Kwizatz Haderach is simply a profit figure. It unites the Fremen to become the dominant power of the world (and quite violently so). That is very allegorical towards modern day extremist Islam.
The other theme is that the profit of the Fremen is not complete. The later books show this in that Leto II came and did away with the Fremen empire built by his father.
I agree that there are huge similarities between the Fremen and modern Islamic groups. What's funny is that Frank Herbert got the idea of the story not from the conflicts in the Middle East but from the exploitation of Africa. Diamond and oil.
One of the key points of Dune is not necessarily power or oppression but political trappings. It is much more a criticism of how the powers than be (the emperor, the navigator's guild, the bene gesserit, etc.) were all interlocked and trapped by each other in a perpetual cycle of deceit and backstabbing. None of them could accomplish anything and humanity was at a standstill destined for extinction should anything slight thing (such as the sandworms dying) interrupt their routine.
It's an allegory to the dependence on oil and the globalized politics of today. How even the U.S., being the superpower that it is, is locked into binding treaties and very restricted in terms of what it can do to help itself or the world.
I'm gonna agree that this may not turn out how they want it to. Although I'm all for throwing out the old and starting new, the sheer fact that Windows has to support not just legacy software (which can be easy to emulate, sort of) but legacy hardware as well, probably means more people will have issues with this than not.
The main advantage here is self-clocking chips with high frequency requirements. Typical low-frequency chips either can live with an external oscillator, are clocked by another control chip or aren't very frequency-dependent and use internal ring-oscillators.
This is already done. Very few microchips nowadays only operate using one clock. Internally, the main clock (or in some cases multiple main clocks) are gated or divided down to drive lower-frequency components (albeit multi-cycle paths are used more often). The case you mentioned of a critical path running too slow can be alleviated by using multi-cycle paths.
The problem, however, is that the rest of the chip still has to wait for the results from that critical path. Whether it's clocked slower, or allowed 2+ cycles to settle, the rest of the circuits still have to wait. So you could clock it up however fast you want but it's not going to change the fact that that one little critical path will halt the data flow.
CMOS is silicon-dioxide as well......or at least the substrate is.
The point here is that instead of a discrete chip using a different fabrication process, a resonator can be built on a standard CMOS process. The article is very short on details of how this thing actually works but I was under the impression that we had such a technology already. It's called a ring oscillator....
That's for RF chips and RF signals. Silicon Germanium (SiGe) is the material and the 350 GHz signal being propagated is a sine wave with the FET being kept in the linear region. Digital signals are much more difficult to get to 350 GHz.
To give you an idea, in a mixed signal BiCMOS chip where the digital components are standard CMOS and there's a SiGe layer on top for the RF circuits, the RF transistors are capable of amplifying an input sine wave all the way to the multiple tens of GHz. In the same process, the peak switching frequency for a digital signal is around maybe 5 GHz for an inverter let's say.
Digital switching has many properties that an analog signal does not. It has a knee frequency and rise/fall time requirements. It has to switch above and below the detection threshold (and regenerate the signal through each gate rather than propagate any low signal levels). Being able to have a transistor propagate a 350 GHz sine wave is orders of magnitudes easier (and possible) than having a flip-flop operate at 350 GHz using the same process technology.
"Insane Google-fu" can be put on my resume under "skills".
And here I thought they were called "applications". And I believe they already are sold separately. And can be added/removed at whim. Hell, my Windows XP even has a friendly UI to help me keep track of, and add/remove any that I want.
1. Text books do make a difference. Pick up an edition of Steven Smith's "The Scientist & Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing" and compare it to whatever book your professor published and subsequently made you use for the course. The difference is stark. I know it was for me. This is what a lot of college students don't get. They need to do independent research instead of relying on material given to them by professors. There are so many other sources out there that do a way better job at explaining the material.
2. Other majors are inflated. Though this is an issue per se with the engineering curriculum it does offer unusually high expectations from uninformed employers. Grades for my engineering classes were what they should've been. C means you did the bare minimum but you got by with enough of the material learned. B means you tried but didn't excel at it. A means you have the stuff committed to memory like the curves of Scarlett Johanson's boobies. Not everyone's cut out to be an A student but with effort, everyone should be able to get a B. C means you're either gifted and didn't crack the book open or mediocre and didn't try too hard.
3. This is very important because it is the mentality a lot of engineering students (possibly bright ones) have come their second year. They consequently either just tough it out and graduate with very little passion for their field study or switch to other majors. The result you get is the stereotypical "math nerd" engineers who graduate able to do equations with the best of them but with the insight and broad-thinking abilities of a worker ant.
4. As a result of #3, the entire field of engineers is stereotyped and further turns away otherwise creative and talented prospective engineers (and women).
5. As a result of #4, I had to take Comparative Literature just to meet girls.
6. So yes, it's very fucking important and relevant to nerds. It is STUFF THAT MATTERS.
Interesting, so what they want to do is to be able to create larger multi-chip packages where each the chips are connected to each other optically rather than the traditional wire-bonds on a SiP. I'm honestly not seeing the advantage here in terms of speed. A single LVDS pair across a chip pad and wire-bond can already carry "tens of billions of bits per second" of bandwidth. Many can be put in parallel. I can see this being an advantage if they've discovered some ultra-efficient electro-optical conversion device that's can be etched into silicon. LVDS drivers and receivers do suck up a lot of power....
Even a directed wireless transmitter through a waveguide only manages to send a fraction of its signal power over to the receiver. There's also the problem that it's much more susceptible to interference, it drains a lot of power because RF signals are not easy to generate at high speeds, the extra logic required and the fact that the bandwidth is just nowhere near what traditional wired links are capable of might not make it all that attractive.
No, but it depends on whether or not the receiver is current-steered or voltage-steered. If it's voltage steered then it's the propagation of the electric field that carries the signal. In which case, it can be near the speed of light.
Also, future chip-to-chip interconnects seem to be moving towards transmission lines rather than treating circuit paths like bulk interconnects. Wave-pipelining the signal will mean that data transfer rates will not be hindered by the time it takes a voltage swing from transmitter to reach the receiver. Latency is still a problem, however but I imagine the electro-optical conversion process already adds plenty of that.