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The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive reality
- mjevans 8y agoThey're correct, it's been obvious to everyone that there are limits to physics that preclude pushing much smaller than we are presently designing without switching to a different method of creating logic devices.
- deepnotderp 8y agoAnd what would that different method be?
- delecti 8y agoI think if they knew that they'd probably be selling the answer, not giving it away here. It's clear the our current approach to making chips is approaching a fundamental limit, it's not clear that there's an alternative, other than asymptotically scraping increasingly small performance gains as we toe closer to that line.
- mycall 8y agohttps://www.darpa.mil/program/hierarchical-identify-verify-exploit https://www.darpa.mil/program/hierarchical-identify-verify-e...
- delecti 8y agoThat's probably the other half of where things will go. General purpose computers eking out minor performance gains, and niche applications continuing to move toward more and more specialized and single-purpose hardware.
- opportune 8y agoI’m sure there are plenty of ways to physically implement logic that don’t rely on mostly-2D silicon transistor chips. Perhaps some of those pathways, once sufficiently developed, will have a higher upper bound on performance I think in the near term we will see micro fluid cooling tech developed for more fully 3D chips. The human brain is a pretty good model for what that may look like
- mjevans 8y agoIn addition to the other replies... it isn't obvious that there is going to be one. Experts far more versed in this field than I might have theories that could pan out, but I wouldn't know. Science fiction likes to point to either optical or some method of quantum interaction computing. I'm actually not sure what the basis for those are, it could be that photon based computers are actually a type of quantum computation system. As I led with, that's stuff I've seen mentioned in fiction.
- 394549 8y agoThis is a paywall bypass for a Financial Times story. I think that should be mentioned in the title.
- Volt 8y agoThanks, I had to wonder why this was on archive.is.
- cm2187 8y agoSo basically we will now need to write more efficient software. A novel idea to many!
- c487bd62 8y agoReality: we get Electron but this time using Servo
- inferiorhuman 8y agoYeah this is the most uncomfortable opinion I see with rust. In general rust doesn't seem terribly well suited to existing toolkits (as most make heavy use of the OO paradigm). What's left is often very immature (e.g. cursive) and so there tends to be a knee-jerk reaction of: let's build a GUI toolkit on top of Servo. Electron isn't just bad because it's all a mess of javascript, it's bad because it's not portable, because the resulting apps are bloated and non-performant, and because they never quite work like native apps. For all the people who wave the "one true Scotsman" flag at people whinging about the non-native feel of Electron I'd just like to point at Visual Studio Code. Opening a file vs directory on Windows is a hilarious exercise in fermented emacs-like keystrokes. On a Mac, try using the "Window" menu (it doesn't list the children) or try using the minimized window icons (they all have the very useful title "Code").
- dagenix 8y ago> Electron isn't just bad because it's all a mess of javascript, it's bad because it's not portable Electron runs on (at least) Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. That may not be perfect, but, I think its hard to brand that as "not portable".
- inferiorhuman 8y ago> Electron runs on (at least) Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. Take a look at the issues opened for porting Visual Studio Code to not-Linux/not-MacOS/not-Windows. It's non-trivial in large part because Electron is a mess and not officially supported beyond Linux/Mac/Windows.
- megaman8 8y agoAs a consumer, I'd rather see them make faster hard drives. I think that's a much bigger impact than faster CPUs. I remember when i got my mac book pro 2015. the hard drive was so much faster than 5 years earlier. I can now boot up in less than 20 seconds. and my IDE opens in less then 4 seconds. getting those two numbers down to 1 or less would be a much bigger improvement, IMHO.
- fspeech 8y agoDo you mean faster SSDs?
- loeg 8y agoI think OP means any non-volatile, 1TB +/- an order of magnitude storage. Most of us don't care what the physical media is as long as it's durable and fast.
- ryanmarsh 8y agoYou’re not wrong but I just bought the 2018 MacBook Pro (i9, 6 core) to replace my 2016 TB MBP. Both had an SSD but the new one blows the doors off the old one (video encoding, compiling code). What I could use now is more memory on or near the CPU maybe like the iPhone A7+.
- craftyguy 8y agoThe new one is probably an nvme attached directly to PCIe, and the other is probably connecting over SATA. These days, no two SSDs are the same.
- GeekyBear 8y agoThey are both NVMe. Apple bought a company that developed NVMe SSD controllers and has been producing it's own custom controllers for a few years now. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9136/the-2015-macbook-review/8 https://www.anandtech.com/show/9136/the-2015-macbook-review/... The 2018 MacBook Pro is just using a newer high performance version of the controller. >The T2 is also Apple’s SSD controller, so this means that the MBP is getting a SSD upgrade. Apple is now offering up to 4TB of SSD storage on the 15-inch MBP and 2TB on the 13-inch model. And judging from some of the numbers the 4TB iMac Pro has put up with the same controller, the 15-inch MBP stands to have chart-topping SSD performance. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13073/apple-updates-macbook-pro-family-for-2018 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13073/apple-updates-macbook-p...
- bmurray7jhu 8y ago"Software-defined hardware" We can only hope that this term never becomes a buzzword.
- skunkworker 8y agoIsn't that just a FPGA?
- vvanders 8y agoNah, FPGAs are programmable hardware, it's a subtle but important difference.
- stephengillie 8y agoIs programming not defining something with software - encoding physical actions (math) as wordy descriptions (art)?
- arcticbull 8y agoYeah I'm not 100% sure what the difference is, I'd love an elaboration. The languages you program FPGAs in typically are in the class of hardware description languages (HDLs) - and IMO description and definition are interchangeable in this context.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoHDLs are not software. There is no generated instruction sequence. The end result can just as readily be an ASIC which is most definitely not "software defined".
- arcticbull 8y agoThere absolutely can be a generated instruction sequence, that just depends on the compiler. That's what GHDL does if I'm not mistaken. In fact, "by using a code generator (llvm, GCC or a builtin one), GHDL is much faster than any interpreted simulator." [1] Theoretically I could write any web service in a synthesizable subset of VHDL. Similarly, you could, in theory, compile down any C program into an FPGA bitstream, as both HDLs and C are Turing complete. It may not function efficiently as the right considerations probably haven't been made in your C code to make it easy to do well. I could even turn my C program into an ASIC but that's not the point. The fact that FPGAs are reprogrammable and their functionality is defined in code means they are as much software defined as as any microcontroller. That definition IMO doesn't stretch to ASICs as they are not reprogrammable, and the resulting HDL goes through a huge pipeline of vendor-specific tools to turn the result into silicon. This is my opinion of course, and I would argue that an FPGA bitstream is equivalent to a ROM for a microcontroller - software that defines the digital electrical characteristics in response to stimuli. Seems that if the latter is defined by software so is the former. [1] http://ghdl.free.fr http://ghdl.free.fr
- bobajeff 8y agoIt sounds like it's going to be exciting times in the field of chip design.
- fouc 8y agoI thought this was going to be about competition with China.
- carapace 8y agoLatching sort-nets.