What is Digg?28 Comments
- fracai, on 05/04/2008, -1/+17"Photo credits: Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, Intel Corporation (Note that images are not to scale)"
The what is the frickin' point of the article?!
Moore's law is meaningless without a scale. That last picture could be a square kilometer for all we know. - NailerNforce, on 05/04/2008, -0/+8These pictures are too small =(
On a side note: Didn't they just break the one billion mark lately? - Culyt, on 05/04/2008, -0/+6I think we would probably know if there was a processor processors a kilometer in size lying around, it's a bit hard to hide, especially when you remember it need to be cooled. Maybe it could run Crysis.
Actually why don't they make larger processors, super computers with dinner plate sized processors and such. - hrvat420, on 05/04/2008, -0/+6the future is cool
- Firehed, on 05/04/2008, -0/+5For all you know maybe, but the rest of us know that the latest chips are smaller than your thumbnail.
- Firehed, on 05/04/2008, -0/+4Because electricity litereally doesn't travel fast enough - the speed of light is too slow.
Light and electricity travel at approx. 300,000,000 meters per second in a vacuum. CPUs often have an operating frequency of around 3GHz - 3,000,000,000 cycles per second. In one three billionth of a second (and remember, we've seen chips go much faster than 3GHz), electricity can't travel more than 10cm, just under four inches. When you figure that it's not exactly traveling in a straight line inside the chip, in addition to the fact that it's not contained in a vacuum near absolute zero... you do the math.
And, of course, as acdcfanbill points out, it's far more efficient when things are smaller. - griz, on 05/04/2008, -0/+4Not according to Al Gore.
- blast_flame, on 05/04/2008, -0/+4How I love accelerating technological progress. The singularity is going to be awesome.
- tylerjwilk, on 05/04/2008, -0/+3"My CPU is a neural net processor. A learning computer."
- blueloop68, on 05/04/2008, -1/+4*insert skynet reference here*
- Shadowgamers, on 05/04/2008, -1/+4http://tinyurl.com/2maupe
For people who wonder what the limit to computation is :v - Shadowgamers, on 05/04/2008, -0/+2'Actually why don't they make larger processors'
IBM did that with that 5.2gh/z processor, I think it was 120nm IIRC :V - DifferentAngle, on 05/04/2008, -0/+2A couple years ago - intel's huge caches push the limits quite easily ;)
- hrvat420, on 05/04/2008, -0/+2complicated stuff
- inactive, on 05/04/2008, -1/+3Imagine what my laptop will have in 10 years. A 5-year-old's kiddy cellphone will have as much power as my laptop by then.
- jakem1, on 05/04/2008, -0/+2Shouldn't the 1980's be 16-bit processors?
- yodaj007, on 05/04/2008, -0/+2Ah, electricity does not flow at the speed of light.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity - acdcfanbill, on 05/04/2008, -0/+1because smaller size = less energy wasted as heat.
- inactive, on 05/06/2008, -0/+1Crappy aliens and their one transistor chips, no wonder they crash so often......
- Virgule, on 05/04/2008, -0/+1The 1960 one strongly remind me of Durandal's sword...
http://marathon.bungie.org/story/terms/chapter-scr ... - Shadowgamers, on 05/04/2008, -0/+1I would guess they're somewhere in the region of 100nm (for the oldest, those AMD Athlons were ***** huge) to 40nm (itty bitty processors V:)
- MacSuxWindozSux, on 05/04/2008, -0/+1The last picture is a rectangle.
- MtheoryX, on 05/04/2008, -0/+1Seems like Calculus to me.
- blackjack75, on 05/04/2008, -0/+1What makes me sad is to think how slow some things happen on a computer today despite the huge power we have got. For example opening a file requester. I remember it once was instantaneous on Amiga, now it sometimes takes two seconds on OSX if you have network drives or other slow responding devices (sleeping HD).
Sure we're asking much more than we did back then, but the hardware difference should compensate for it.. - antdude, on 05/05/2008, -0/+1Why is it using Flash for an image? :( I thought it would be an interactive one.
- troye, on 05/05/2008, -1/+1Use the power of The Fox. Firefox 3 beta 5, hit 'Ctrl and +' simultaneously to magnify everything in browser window. It won't give you higher res, but it will make it easier to examine and larger.
- MtheoryX, on 05/04/2008, -2/+1*insert some tired old arnold quote here*
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