Clockspeed limits and a vent

[tkopp]

Today, coming out of Math class I overheard some people talking about the future of computing. Being interested in the subject, I asked, 'When we hit 20 terahertz or so, will computers emit light instead of radio waves and in that way interferance between chips will not matter so much?' In response I got icy stares.

It was expounded unto me that I had no idea what I was talking about, that computers could never get that fast, and that the future was not in clockspeed but rather quantum computing. When I asked, 'Oh, so you can transmit more data per clock then?' All they responded was, 'Go home and try to learn what you're talking about. Don't talk about subjects you won't understand.'

Uh... Sure. I didn't bother mentioning Intel's 20ghz ALU or their new .09-micron process. Weren't we saying that clockspeeds couldn't get much faster back around .3micron also? What about advances like SOI that let us go faster than we had previously thought possible? Is it so hard to believe that some day we'll get that fast?

Hey, and if we do, will chips emit light?

 

[Saem]

The road blocks ahead have very little to do with transistor switching speeds and a whole lot to do with interconnects. As you get scale down chips, the interconnects get thinner, so resistance goes up, so new interconnect technology/material is what we're looking at.

Besides that, I think there will need to be a big changes in ISAs, x86 blows, EPIC is far too proprietary and x86-64 merely perpretuates an obsolete ISA. New ISAs which deal with scaling issues, better compilers, languages and wider and multi core MPUs is where computing should be heading in the next while.

As for the elitest shmucks in your math class, don't mind them, quantum computing is still a long ways away and right now it's all about drumming up investments and shotgunning patents to get a lock on the possibly applicable technologies. As for what it is supposed to be, it's all about doing massive amounts of calculations in parallel and simply choosing the answers that are relavent to you, or at least that's what the hype was since last I checked.