Has fast will we get to with cpu's?

[Terminal23]

How fast can cpu's possibly go to?The fastest right now is 1.7 Ghz.They seem to increase at a fast frequency lately.So if my calculations are correct we should see a cpu doing 80 Ghz in ten years.Is this even possible or am I just dreaming?Any thoughts?

[Hellmund]

Cpu's are already past 1.7ghz. That's the fastest commercially avaiable stock standard CPU. There's no set limit to how fast a CPU will go, once solid state is as small as it can get they'll use a different kind of cpu.

[RobRich]

Several technolgies are currently emerging which should allow for near exponential speed increases over the next several years. A few examples include:

-Semiconductor substrate manufacturing using an advanced gaseous nitrogen interface material instead of silicon. The nitrogen gas actually forms a nearly pure substrate solid when raised to extremely high pressures. The nice part? The nitrogen-based material stays solid after the compression process, even at standard atmospheric pressures.

-Silicon on Insulator (SOI) is likely to be the next masive fabrication change within the retail market sector. Here is my recent article on SOI:

http://sysopt.earthweb.com/articles/soi/index.html

-Silicon Germanium is another hybrid manufacturing process which could allow even current production processes technology to scale to well below .5 micron for increased frequency ramping well into the multiple GHz range.

These are just a few emerging technologies with promising potential. For further research, check out some of the latest papers published at IBM or Intel's developer sites.

Catch ya' later,
Robert Richmond

[Recordlord]

Last year sometime a doctor used biological tissue to complete simple arithmetic. Although the math problems took 15 minutes to complete it is still new technology that havent beeeen tapped yet. It makes me wonder how many bits of data can a single strand of DNA possibly hold??

[Hellmund]

That reminds me of a popular mechanics article I read agggeeeeees ago... They theorised that a 100Litre cylinder of DNA could hold all the information on every computer in the world, I'll have a look for it as I'm probaly way off by now, that was atleast a year ago.

[nilknarf]

That's not to far fetched either. If you consider that current digital systems are binary in nature, as far as the actual data storage. Which means that every bit of data has two possible states, either a zero or one.

DNA, on the other hand, is made up of four ammino acids, and therefore is considered quarternary. That is, it technically has four possible states for each bit of data.

The power of organic processing is also extrodinary. Consider for a moment, as I am writing this, my brain is sending commands to both hands, my fingers, arms, and eyes, just to type this information! That doesn't include the involuntary commands being sent to various organs, and the occasional command to change my seating position. On top of all of this, my brain is also processing the information I'm typing, the language (vocabulary, spelling, grammar) information for this information, a multitude of sensory inputs, unknown numbers of sub-conscious thoughts, interpreting those sensory inputs to determine what's going on around me, and other conscious tasks on demand. All this, while keeping focus on my primary tasks at hand. No computer yet built, can match the size to peformance ability of a human brain. The human brain, or any brain, is truly a marvelous piece of organic engineering.

Tim

[LiLRiceBoi]

Lets just see how long moore's law will take us

[Brangwen]

nilknarf: Well thought out and ponderable stuff.

RobRich: Thanks for the link to a very interesting development.

Brangwen http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif

[HomeYield]

A graduate student that I know has done research on processors that get their information from optical light. He is doing research to try and speed up processors and even harddrives with light. By sending data at different wave lengths of light the processor can determine from that more than it can from 1's and 0's in an even smaller amount of time. If optics could be utilitzed then processors could go as fast or faster than the speed of light (http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1999/split/pnu434-1.htm) .

It would be interesting to see a Pentium 5000 1000THz processor.

[MTAtech]

I remember having this discussion over dinner with a well-respected software developer about 10 years ago. He was convinced that we were then reaching the limit of speed [50Mhz] because of the natural limitations such as the speed of light. Boy was he wrong.

I am sure there is some limit but we aren't anywhere close to it.

The real question is what will we do with that speed? My PC is more powerful than my univerity's entire computer system when I went to college. However, on that weak system professors where unlocking the secrets of the universe. Although my computing power is greater, my uses are much more modest.

[DemonKnight]

Who needs more Hz? I say go for higher bit rates. Who would like a 1Ghz 1024Bit processor? hell even a 1Ghz 128bit processor would be awsome. Considering it has 4 times the bandwith that a normal 32 bit processor has.

[nilknarf]

32-bit processors use 32-bit instructions. A 128-bit processor would use 128-bit instructions. This doesn't necessarily mean it would have a higher bandwidth, although you would certainly hope so, it just means it can process a larger instruction.

[Bob The Great]

Could you amagine feeding your DNA powered PC! har har!

No really cool stuff is happining! I can't wait to see what the future will bring! PC's always amaze me. Or actaully the people who make the PC's!

[charmler]

I read about a crystal based storage system somewhere that used lasers of varying frequency and speed to store data. I also remember someone slowing a laser down to about 38 mph recently. The implications were for computing speeds of wavelength proportions and zero heat produced as photons contain no heat.