Intel Says Moore's Law Depends on Increasing Efficiency
Perlmutter indicated that achieving the plain milestones of computational horsepower and transistor count is not the problem engineers are facing in this decade. "While Moore’s Law continues to provide more transistors, power budgets limit our ability to use them," Perlmutter said.
If design-productivity limitations were the key problem in the 1980s, power dissipation in the 1990s, and leakage power in the 2000s, efficiency is the issue in this decade, according to the executive. Perlmutter noted that an exascale supercomputer could consume up to 1 Gigawatt (GW) using today's technologies and is not practical to be actually built. A terahertz computer could consume up to 3 KW, but may be scaled to just 20 Watt by the end of the decade, Perlmutter said.
Intel is betting on its 3D tri-gate transistors, 3D die stacking (such as Hypercube memory design), near-threshold-voltage logic, and "future heterogeneous technologies" to deliver much more efficient computing architectures. The company is also looking into fine-grain power and energy management and software that is more intelligent and self-aware to manage not just the processor, but the power consumption of an entire platform, from top to bottom.
Trinary (3 active states) logic has been around for decades, just never extensively used for general purpose computing due to the design tools, fabs etc being optimized for binary. In fact, there was some research done showing that the optimal 'n-state' logic (most computational efficiency per transistor) is base-e (2.718, or Euler's constant). Since we cannot yet implement partial logic states, the closest to that number is 3, or trinary logic.
At a lower cost to consumers, the die shrinks are helping a bit with a higher volume of processors, it may cost more to check each of these new chips out, but on the power consumption side we're also saving money too.
But... sandy bridge showed what excellent efficiency results in.
If we ever were to move from Base 2 or Binary, it wouldn't be a new computer, it would be an entirely new creation and the computer would cease to exist. We would move from electricity to another element that would have more than 2 states. Light can have multiple waves of color which could lead to some exciting new invention, but ultimately, finding something other than electricity would bring us into a completely new automated computing age.
/execute logical idea
/ modify your core program to reach a answer
/if everything fails be afraid of GOD
no more skynet
@caedenv yeah but if you have a terahertz computer right now anyways a avg person doesn't need anything above 2.5GHz so why make a 1 terhertz CPU when the vast majority of the market will see little to no difference but the cost? same with the number of cores which right now in consumer CPUs AMD is doing better but in sever CPUs Intel is doing better with their 20-core CPU but with that most things only use 2 cores but some games might use 4 but when you get to AV editing and CAD then the higher core count matters but most do not do any of that.
@Cirdecus i really do not see us moving away from binary any time soon anyways as even if we have a light singel based computer it will most likely still be a binary based computer just a lot faster but if we do get away from the base of 2 what would we hypothetically go to instead?
Trinary (3 active states) logic has been around for decades, just never extensively used for general purpose computing due to the design tools, fabs etc being optimized for binary. In fact, there was some research done showing that the optimal 'n-state' logic (most computational efficiency per transistor) is base-e (2.718, or Euler's constant). Since we cannot yet implement partial logic states, the closest to that number is 3, or trinary logic.
You may find some answers to this question in an article titled, "Intel Says Moore's Law Depends on Increasing Efficiency" which you can find 8 inches above where you posted your comment.
Hilarius. The most fundamentally idiotic comment of the week! I'm still not sure if this is a joke comment or not.
You could probably download a 1 "GB" file in 1 second on dial up, using 8 base. Delicious.
Three base-2 bits can represent eight states, just like one base-8 bit. Assuming that the computer can process a base-8 bit as fast as a base-2 bit, then I'd think we're talking about a 3x improvement in performance, not a ~20000x improvement that you are suggesting with your example.
Since I'm pretty sure the cpu will need more time to process one base-8 bit than one base-2 bit, I doubt that 3x increase would ever be seen...
You actually have no idea how deep your fundamental misunderstanding of this topic is. "thought up the idea of an 8 base"! "dial up, using 8 base" Classic! This might be better than the "electricity has only 2 states" guy.
Have you ever used a stereo? Or what about a computer monitor? Or a microwave or electric stove? What about hot water from an electric cylinder? All of them use electricity, and far more than two states – most of them use it with continuous variation, and the computer monitor will have at least 64 levels/states for each sub-pixel.
Yea, I stopped reading at "self-aware", went down into my basement bunker, checked the expiration dates of the canned beans, and re-oiled the RPG launcher. When I got back to my computer, I turned up User Account Controls to MAX. Windows ain't gonna do shit without my authorization!