3 ms·

I don't think moving off of silicon will help all that much. What would you move to? Germanium I guess, but I don't think you'll get a factor of 10 from that. W

I don't think moving off of silicon will help all that much. What would you move to? Germanium I guess, but I don't think you'll get a factor of 10 from that. We're already down to a scale where the feature size isn't much larger than the atoms themselves.

dharma1 11y ago
I think some types of computation can be done with optical processors orders of magnitude faster. It's still early days but I think really interesting http://www.optalysys.com http://www.optalysys.com http://www.lighton.io http://www.lighton.io
- jeffreyrogers 11y ago
  Hmmm, interesting. Another problem is memory latency. Actual throughput is usually about 10% of advertised throughput because programmers and compilers can't give the processor useful work to do for most of the clock cycles. My source for this 10% figure is from some slides from Ulrich Drepper, but I don't have time to find them right now.
marcosdumay 11y ago
A big obvious candidate is organics. It is not clear what kinds of short term gains are possible, nor what kinds of designs it would allow. But it looks very likely that the theoretical optimum substrate will turn out to be some kind of organic compost. If not them, there are all kinds of III-V crystals. They come with their own share of problems, but they might be good for something beyond LEDs. I think the greatest help from any non-silicon design will be from better heat dissipation and lower leakage. Those still have a lot of room to improve.
- beeboop 11y ago
  Would organic processing actually be any faster? A human brain is capable of more than an Intel CPU in some ways due to its complexity, not due to its speed. And obviously the brain falls short of the CPU in many many ways.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    Organic transistors are stuff made of nanotubes, graphene, diamond, polypropilene, poly-benzoates, and other stuff like that. Not cells, RNA and protein (although, who knows? maybe there's something on them).

dharma1 11y ago

I think some types of computation can be done with optical processors orders of magnitude faster. It's still early days but I think really interesting http://www.optalysys.com http://www.optalysys.com http://www.lighton.io http://www.lighton.io

jeffreyrogers 11y ago
Hmmm, interesting. Another problem is memory latency. Actual throughput is usually about 10% of advertised throughput because programmers and compilers can't give the processor useful work to do for most of the clock cycles. My source for this 10% figure is from some slides from Ulrich Drepper, but I don't have time to find them right now.

marcosdumay 11y ago

A big obvious candidate is organics. It is not clear what kinds of short term gains are possible, nor what kinds of designs it would allow. But it looks very likely that the theoretical optimum substrate will turn out to be some kind of organic compost. If not them, there are all kinds of III-V crystals. They come with their own share of problems, but they might be good for something beyond LEDs. I think the greatest help from any non-silicon design will be from better heat dissipation and lower leakage. Those still have a lot of room to improve.

beeboop 11y ago
Would organic processing actually be any faster? A human brain is capable of more than an Intel CPU in some ways due to its complexity, not due to its speed. And obviously the brain falls short of the CPU in many many ways.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  Organic transistors are stuff made of nanotubes, graphene, diamond, polypropilene, poly-benzoates, and other stuff like that. Not cells, RNA and protein (although, who knows? maybe there's something on them).