51–60 of 65 posts
As usual, memristor based computing architecture is left out. Intel's 3DXPoint has already brought memristor memory units to market. The beauty of memristor architectures is that they can be used for logic and storage, so you can create some radical new architectures with them. I'm too lazy to link the talk by Stan Williams of HP, but if you google it it's the ~45min one. This is the next architecture because it's al…
Well, none of those listed technologies is practical. Ternary logic is really cool, but it only gets you about a 10% efficiency improvement. I think it would be awesome to go in this direction, but retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86. The only thing that will really make progress is molecular nanotechnology. I had always believed that reaching the end of silicon process…
However, fluidics was/still is a practical technology for niche applications. Fluidic non-moving part logic devices have been used for for factory process control and integrated pneumatic controllers for aerospace for decades now. Fluidics can be very robust and reliable. In the time period of the 1960s-1970s fluidics was more reliable than similar electrical and electromechanical systems. One thing that still makes fluidics attractive today is its robustness in environments where transistors don't work. Fluidics can with stand high temperatures, high shocks, high radiation, high magnetic fields, etc. As long as the shape of the channel remains intact, fluidics still works. Fluidics has been demonstrated to work inside jet engines, nuclear reactors, and molten steel.
Because of fluidics inherent EMP resistance, fluidics has been considered for use in anti-ballistic missile guidance systems[0].
One interesting current day application of fluidics is kosher sound amplification[1]. Orthodox Judaism prohibits electronic sound amplification on the sabbath because it constitutes work. Using a speaker to produce sound constitutes labor because it creates a sound that did not exist before from electricity. Fluidics is able to get around this prohibition and can amplify sound in the range of human speech.
As far as molecular nanotechnology goes, some of the first molecular computers we may see might resemble the BZ media mentioned in the article. Right now we can make a whole range of interesting molecular devices including logic gates and motors among other things, but it is difficult to put them together into larger devices. It's hard to hook up a molecular motor to a molecular wheel to a molecular suspension to make a molecular car[2], much less wire up a bunch of molecular logic gates in a defined pattern to make a molecular computer.
However, it is significantly easier to make periodic structures. Metal Organic Frameworks(MOFs) offer a way to organize molecular machines into periodic structures. They are pretty great for this because they self-assemble and have a bunch of open space for molecular machines to move around, but still close enough that they can interact with each other.
Some researchers have proposed that we could use MOFs with molecular machines in them to make cellular automata with mole quantities of cells.[3]
[0]http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDo... [1]http://acoustics.org/pressroom/httpdocs/132nd/2aaa8.html [2]http://www.cemes.fr/Molecule-car-Race?lang=en [3]http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2012/CS/c1cs15...
For all the interesting things happening today, this is an incredibly dull article. I'm convinced I read this same article in the 90's. If we're going to see any developments in alternative architectures and hardware, it's going to happen in the cloud computing space. From my perspective, this is the only sector that is in the unique position to sell specialized computing services to customers on a mass scale and mak…
I think this was what Google is trying with their TPU for running TensorFlow for machine learning applications.
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercha...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anything this necessitates advances in parallel computing. We can keep up with Moores law for a bit longer if we add more cores too.
Moore's law is about transistor density.
The chemical, wetware, fluid and ternary computing concepts mentioned in the article I guess make for a good headline but seem highly unlikely. In the short term I really think we are entering the era of accelerators. Accelerators like Micron's Automata Processor (1) for graph analysis, accelerators for compute intensive applications like Convolutional Neural Nets, continued innovation in DSPs, GPUs, etc. Accelerator…
Yes, almost certainly the next phase for performance-intensive computing is more specialized chips, systems-on-a-chip, and whole specialized rigs. The TensorFlow Processing Unit is a good recent example of this, as are ASICs in bitcoin mining, specialized hardware in molecular biology simulation, and more examples. This is just the beginning. I think the interesting question is what happens after that. Not too long f…
I think it's pretty clear that we're going to see the introduction of all sorts of specialized hardware that we already more or less know how to do but it just hasn't been worth the trouble before. But you're also right that, so long as we're still talking CMOS, this is probably a more or less one-time boost that's maybe worth a few CMOS generations depending on the specific case.
Well, none of those listed technologies is practical. Ternary logic is really cool, but it only gets you about a 10% efficiency improvement. I think it would be awesome to go in this direction, but retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86. The only thing that will really make progress is molecular nanotechnology. I had always believed that reaching the end of silicon process…
Ternary logic actually happened - a bunch of Soviet computers used it [1], and it was somewhat faster/more cost efficient, but not decisively so. In the end, the party decided that code compatibility with the west was more important than independent innovation, and the soviet computer industry slowly lost it's charm and died in the late 80s. Never heard of a ternary computer since then. [1] http://www.computer-museum…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86." I wonder if today it's easier than people imagine, but the lessons of Itanium are used as a signal to not try. Sure there are plenty of apps which make low-level use of x86 features, and those probably aren't going to be updated. However a lot of modern software is written in languages that go through interrupters. Java, C#, Python…
Switching to ternary means retooling not just the programming stack but the IC design stack. IC design is actually quite a conservative business, mainly because failures are so expensive. You'd need to spend several years writing a ternary RTL synthesis, place, route and verification suite before starting.
Well, none of those listed technologies is practical. Ternary logic is really cool, but it only gets you about a 10% efficiency improvement. I think it would be awesome to go in this direction, but retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86. The only thing that will really make progress is molecular nanotechnology. I had always believed that reaching the end of silicon process…
Intel, Samsung and TSMC have all demonstrated their 10nm processes with TSMC expected to be the first to mass production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_nanometer
I believe nVidia and AMD use Samsung and TSMC as their advanced fabs which is how they stay alive. They get to keep the expensive factories off their books and the factories can use their capacity to make more than just AMD and nVidia parts keeping their lines full. At least that's the theory...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Switching to ternary means retooling not just the programming stack but the IC design stack. IC design is actually quite a conservative business, mainly because failures are so expensive. You'd need to spend several years writing a ternary RTL synthesis, place, route and verification suite before starting.
I would expect that once silicon stops shrinking and both chips and fabs can be allowed to pay for themselves over longer time horizons we're going to see a lot more architectural experimentation.
I like the Mill CPU design, and they're saying it will have a 10x power/performance advantage over traditional architectures.
But we're just about done with the times where we had easy gains in price/performance/power by just moving to a smaller process node.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moore's law is about transistor density.
You don't have to increase density to increase the number of transistors.
1. That's not Moore's Law, which is specifically about density.
2. When you aren't getting density increases, your processing power / memory size / whatever increases linearly with die area. We've been used to living in an age with regular process node shrinks, meaning that more and more powerful computers don't end up being more expensive. Sometimes the cost goes down while the performance goes up. We're seeing the end of that right now.