The IDF Discussion Thread

Throughout the week we're going to be posting IDF feature articles on the site, along side some news posts. You can check the bit-tech.net front page: www.bit-tech.net : for updates. Discuss.

 

So why the hell would someone waste there money on such expensive equiptment, just to get such a small increase in performance, Intel should just go ahead and release there 64bit processors and save themselves, caues i know so many people who have bought amd processors just because they are 64bit, and even though they don't have the slightest clue as to what that means, they have to have it. Stupid people. I have nothing against AMD's, or 64 bit AMD's, but to buy an AMD, just to say you have a 64 bit processor is rediculas.

 

wimax: the amish can have internet and not even know it great idea though. I'd prefer something like gigabit fiber lines to every household on the planet but I think that's a bit unreasonable.

 

I like jim as well. Ok this is gonna sound sill, the process of making chips is getting smaller, can you just have more transistors on a larger chip? The die of my AMD XP Barton is realy quite small. Compare that to an old intel Slot A

 

I would just like to make a point on 'Moore's Law' that was touched in the little article.
Last summer I went to a technology conference and, as some of you may already know, Dr. Craig Barrett was there. For those of you who don't know who that is, he's the CEO of intel. He got in front of hundreds of computer nerds like us, and personally assured that moores law would apply to silicon for the next 10 years. so we have roughly 9 years left of silicon chips. He also hinted that they DO have other materials they have used to make chips, pointing out that when silicon becomes inadequate they WILL be ready.

So, as for intel at least, we don't have to worry too much about what happens when we can't use silicon anymore.

 

basically its cellphone Internet on steroids? my cell phone can get me a connection to the net about 20-25 mi away from a tower. no joke! (2 to less than 1 bar of signal, but dont think of running a connection benchmark )

the tech is already here, its just bn revized for use like the way my audiovox 9500 gets me the net away from home.

 

Yes, you can have more transistors, Dodge. But the real problem is that more transistors means more heat from increased activity, so you could have a 128-or-more-bit instruction CPU.
When you add transistors it just means more instructions, or longer words to the instructions, can be processed. This increases the amount of work that gets done, but unfortunately does not speed up the actual processing rate of each transistor. Speed comes from the relative size of the individual transistors and the material each one is made from. The smaller mass and smaller size transistor will always be faster. The goal of all computing is: to harness individual electrons and pass them one at a time through a single conductor one atom thick. That's as small as science tends to believe we can make our computing devices.
Remember how I spoke of heat? Think about the pure effect of the single electron passing from one point to another. It will not have to collide with other electrons as they pass down the conductor. This will effectively destroy the old ways of cooling chips and herald a new age of truly cool computing. Since the electrons don't collide, they will be free and pass energy faster and more efficiently. The end of Moore's Law.
This stage of computing may actually come quicker than we can imagine.... There are so many different corporations and governments dealing with and financing Nanotechnology research at this point. Right now we are supposedly within 20 years of hitting the absolute bottom of it all... Manipulation of individual atoms with the ease of computer assisted assembly. Ergo, The Singularity.
After that, we might not need to go any faster since we could keep up with any other natural reaction science can observe.
As far as the die size goes, the old Slot One chips had a similar die size to the Athlon XP. The package was merely a large heatsink retainer and BGA socket (the CPU was soldered onto the card beneath the heatsink.)

 

WiMax:

Not a new idea in essence. Maybe the technology he is holding will enable a better speed/range, etc and his 'vision' for hot zones and seamless transitions/whole networks and so on is great and forward thinking, but wireless broadband over long distances has been available in Australia for a few years now.

In my part of Australia we can't get ADSL as we are too far out of town, but I have been on a 1 meg wireless broadband connection for a year now. It works line-of-sight to a repeater - mine is about 3 miles away - and it's never skipped a beat, rain, fog, wind, hail or shine. It enables country people to get broadband and ends up being a lot faster (and cheaper) for me than ADSL anyway, as Australia has very heavily speed-capped broadband services, all in the name of squeezing the dollars out of consumers who want anything more than a 256k connection. Even my wireless is capped so the technology is capable of a much faster connection.

 

The material in that article was taken from another source, bit-tech didnt write that, shame

 

Err, sorry?

Every single piece of IDF content was written by me. Would you like to contradict me?

 

I was in sydney over (our) summer and one thing I really didn't like the sound of was the monthly bandwidth limit. I think I pretty much blew my relatives' limits ouf ot the water... :/

I also like the idea of WiMax, mainly because we could then theoretically have wireless 'net on long plane journeys! Ok, it might not work over the ocean but it's still better than nothing.