Has technology come to a stand still?

[Upendra09]

I am talking specifically about CPUs, when will we break the thz barrier? will ever mature past ghz? before we used to make chips to be faster now we make them smarter, so will just continue to make chips smarter or will we make them be faster the fastest people run their CPUs right now is around 4.8 ghz when will we go past 5 ghz and break the thz barrier.

moreover will we need that speed? and for what?

 

[roofus]

software needs to catch up before we really need to go much further.

 

[Upendra09]

yeah so when SW catches up will it need speed or smarts?

 

[Hellboy]

yeah so when SW catches up will it need speed or smarts?

seems like all the gaming software companies have given up on pcs considering how much better our hardware is than consoles.


Why cant Bayoneta be written for the pc, that looks like it could be very good.


PC's are in a stale mate Upy, we got all this tech, never had processors so fast, ATI 5800 is a new mile stone, still waiting for Nvidia GT300 series and the games on the pc are sparse. All the major game manufacturers are putting pc games last it seems. Only a few now are dedicated pc developers. Maxis for one - anyone else think of any.

 

[pat]

yeah so when SW catches up will it need speed or smarts?

storage speed..hdd are too slow

 

[warmon6]

Until we can mass produce chips that dont produce so much heat at the voltage required at the 3+ ghz range, We will only be making smarter chips. Although there are chips out there (made by ibm) that can do 350 GHz (room temperature) and has been over clocked to 500GHz (thanks to nearly absolute zero temperature)

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ibm-500ghz-chip,2992.html

(almost a 4 year old article)

 

[Hellboy]

storage speed..hdd are too slow

good point..


i/o to the hard disk is still the biggest bottle neck now hitting pcs.

SSD drivers are far too expensive and sadly for engineering companies who repair machines far too reliable but far to small at the moment.


someone should make a hybrid drive working with the ssd as a type of cache..

a 64 gb cache would rocket if used right on a 1tb byte drive with a internal memory of 64mb. - maybe thats the answer... windows could be setup to use the internal ssd and expand data, files and progams over the magenetic disk....

oh well back to reading posts on how good amd is some where completely different.

 

[gamerk316]

Even with solid state, Hard Drive speeds are too big a bottleneck, and frankly, Windows isn't a good multi-CPU environment (I partly blame DLL's; static libaries would solve a lot of syncronization issues within windows...).

 

[Upendra09]

Until we can mass produce chips that dont produce so much heat at the voltage required at the 3+ ghz range, We will only be making smarter chips. Although there are chips out there (made by ibm) that can do 350 GHz (room temperature) and has been over clocked to 500GHz (thanks to nearly absolute zero temperature)

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ibm-500ghz-chip,2992.html

(almost a 4 year old article)

a'right that is what i was looking for a good reason why we aren't going faster, so do we need a less dense material or more dense material than silicon

good point..


i/o to the hard disk is still the biggest bottle neck now hitting pcs.

SSD drivers are far too expensive and sadly for engineering companies who repair machines far too reliable but far to small at the moment.


someone should make a hybrid drive working with the ssd as a type of cache..

a 64 gb cache would rocket if used right on a 1tb byte drive with a internal memory of 64mb. - maybe thats the answer... windows could be setup to use the internal ssd and expand data, files and progams over the magenetic disk....

oh well back to reading posts on how good amd is some where completely different.

why don't they make the link between those two things smarter?

and no i am not an AMD fanboy, just wait and see i will recommend an Intel processor as soon as it makes sense

what is HKMG? (High K metal Gate) and why is it so controversial

 

[Upendra09]

Even with solid state, Hard Drive speeds are too big a bottleneck, and frankly, Windows isn't a good multi-CPU environment (I partly blame DLL's; static libaries would solve a lot of syncronization issues within windows...).

Why?

 

[warmon6]

a'right that is what i was looking for a good reason why we aren't going faster, so do we need a less dense material or more dense material than silicon

Well that i can not say. I dont have a good knowledge of what materials wont build up heat quickly nor produce it so quickly.

Although if i had a guess, i would say maybe something denser but thiner would do but as i said. I dont know this so well so, don't take my word for what would be a better material than silicon.

 

[yannifb]

Upendra- HKMG stands for high k metal gate. It reduces leakage in transistors and can possibly boost performance per transistor considerably (when its designed well).

Also there are experimental diamond chips (instead of silicone) that can be clocked at 80Ghz with 300 micro meter transistors. The reason being that they can take extreme amounts of heat.

Imo the future of computers won't be the traditional design. It will either be:
Stacked carbon nano tube chips
biological computers
quantum computers- by far has the most potential.

 

[Upendra09]

yeah i have heard of biological CPUs made out of our DNA it was on TH a few months ago

what do people mean when they say gate last and gate first? JDJ always talks about it. and what is the "gate" and what does it do

we don't have a lot of diamond though do we? and if we mass produce them the cost of diamond will be less than dirt

carbon nano tubes are still being developed and look promising

what do you mean by quantum?

yeah i know google is my best friend but here i can get answers that are somewhat simplified instead of reading PDFs of jargon that i don't understand and besides i don't know a lot of physics yet

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Even with solid state, Hard Drive speeds are too big a bottleneck, and frankly, Windows isn't a good multi-CPU environment (I partly blame DLL's; static libaries would solve a lot of syncronization issues within windows...).

Then dont use old OS, use W7, not XP, as the global changes are in W7, not XP

 

[yannifb]

yeah i have heard of biological CPUs made out of our DNA it was on TH a few months ago

what do people mean when they say gate last and gate first? JDJ always talks about it. and what is the "gate" and what does it do

we don't have a lot of diamond though do we? and if we mass produce them the cost of diamond will be less than dirt

carbon nano tubes are still being developed and look promising

what do you mean by quantum?

yeah i know google is my best friend but here i can get answers that are somewhat simplified instead of reading PDFs of jargon that i don't understand and besides i don't know a lot of physics yet

Quantum computers are very strange. Instead of each bit representing either a 1 or 0 at any time, they can represent both a 0,0; or a 1,0; or a 0,1;or 1,1; at any given time. Its strange, but it means that the computing power increases exponentially. Currently the largest quantum computer is only 16 bits, but still it is pretty powerful.

Also there is a company called Gemesis who has a machine that uses heat and pressure to make diamonds, but its currently expensive.

 

[Guest]

Technology will never stand still, only brains.

 

[yannifb]

Technology will never stand still, only brains.

And trees. They like to stand still.

 

[fazers_on_stun]

My vote is for brake technology as most likely to be at a stand-still

 

[randomizer]

Firstly we need to drop x86, and then we need to drop the transistor.

Technological advancement for CPUs comes down to a few factors:

1) Money
2) Competition (poor competition stagnates innovation)
3) Demand for performance
4) Power consumption
5) Physical size limitations

If we ignore the first 3, since they are obvious, the latter two are what have driven us to where we are today. If vacuum tubes did not use so much power, and weren't as big, they could still be useful for computation. But because demand for performance was growing - and making computers the size of cities but slower than an Atom and more power-hungry than the whole TOP500 combined wasn't practical - there needed to be a technological shift. Hence the discrete transistor. But you can't run Crysis on a computer that requires billions of discrete transistors because power consumption and physical size would prevent it. So the IC was born.

But since then we've only had relatively minor innovations. We've gone from microns to nanometres but we're still using transistors to run our computers as we have been for 40 years. At some point we're going to need a technology shift, and it can't come soon enough.

 

[sighQ2]

Toots and the Maytalls did a song with Willie Nelson called:

Still's Still Moving to Me

but Toots best will always be

Get Up, Stand Up

Now I am going to be singing that for the rest of the day.

Somehow there could be great relevance, or even revelance, in these words; and I will let you know if I find it.

But on topic; we could be waiting for a cold snap. Or did we just have one of those.

 

[sighQ2]

Firstly we need to drop x86, and then we need to drop the transistor.

Technological advancement for CPUs comes down to a few factors:

1) Money
2) Competition (poor competition stagnates innovation)
3) Demand for performance
4) Power consumption
5) Physical size limitations

If we ignore the first 3, since they are obvious, the latter two are what have driven us to where we are today. If vacuum tubes did not use so much power, and weren't as big, they could still be useful for computation. But because demand for performance was growing - and making computers the size of cities but slower than an Atom and more power-hungry than the whole TOP500 combined wasn't practical - there needed to be a technological shift. Hence the discrete transistor. But you can't run Crysis on a computer that requires billions of discrete transistors because power consumption and physical size would prevent it. So the IC was born.

But since then we've only had relatively minor innovations. We've gone from microns to nanometres but we're still using transistors to run our computers as we have been for 40 years. At some point we're going to need a technology shift, and it can't come soon enough.

I think getting rid of x86 would be great. Then we could also get rid of you know who, and the stifling of innovation; such as is being discussed in this topic.

Nice post Random
.

 

[randomizer]

I think getting rid of x86 would be great. Then we could also get rid of you know who, and the stifling of innovation; such as is being discussed in this topic.

Nice post Random
.

I don't believe Intel is stifling innovation in the grand scheme of things. x86 is stuck here because it is so widespread and dumping backwards compatibility is a big no-no these days. Switching architecture is going to be a painful process. If anyone is stifling innovation in the IC arena, it's the market, not the manufacturers. Intel is stepping on other x86 competitors but they themselves are not stifling innovation of other architectures. Look at Itanium. It was an Intel brain child but simply didn't take off because the market rejected the product.

Furthermore, Intel certainly aren't stifling innovation of completely new technologies. The manufacturers know that the silicon-based IC can't be relied on forever, so they are working on R&D into other areas as are universities. They want to be the first to the market with a new technology that will be accepted so that they can dominate the market, like x86 does at the moment. But I still think that the market is going to reject anything new until it is absolutely necessary to change, and therefore I firmly believe that the market is stifling innovation more than anyone else.

 

[Bluescreendeath]

New materials for making CPU chips from silicon-germanium have enabled IBM to create a 500GHz cpu chip.

http://news.cnet.com/Chip-breaks-speed-record-in-deep-freeze/2100-1006_3-6085568.html?tag=nefd.top

It is believed that this chip can exceed 1 Terrahertz when cooled to -451.

CPUs made of other materials such as carbon graphene can also exceed 1 Terrahertz.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/03/26/graphene.to.bump.silicon/

 

[mtyermom]

Also there is a company called Gemesis who has a machine that uses heat and pressure to make diamonds, but its currently expensive.

The production of synthetic diamond has been going on for quite some time, and by several companies/entities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond

Unfortunately the production is far too cost prohibitive to see any kind of consumer level computer/tech related products any time soon. All we can do is hope for more companies to become interested in advancing the technology.

 

[roofus]

I cant help but think the next great thing wont be from anybody we would expect. It will come from some company or group of people who think outside the box and do not necessarily pay mind to logical progression of tech.