6 ms·

I.B.M. Reports Nanotube Chip Breakthrough

204 points by sew 14y ago

hotpockets 14y ago
article link http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nnano.2012.189.html http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nnano.... also more informative stories http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57541381-76/ibm-brings-carbon-nanotube-based-computers-a-step-closer/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57541381-76/ibm-brings-car... http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/newsid=27115.php http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/newsid=27115.php
stickfigure 14y ago
They have long since shrunk the switches to less than a wavelength of light Snort.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- wtallis 14y ago
  What? Transistor sizes hit UV wavelengths around 1995, during the Pentium era. That's a reasonable statement to be making to provide context.
  - ams6110 14y ago
    So "visible light" would have been more accurate, but probably assumed by most readers.
  - jamesaguilar 14y ago
    And there are constructive ways to provide that context, like how you did. "Snort" does not qualify.
    - frozenport 14y ago
      I think "snort" was a joke so that you wouldn't get angry :-)
nine_k 14y ago
TL;DR: IBM found a way to place nanotubes on silicon chips with some precision. Not yet perfect, but it's the best we got so far.
megaman821 14y ago
Any know what the theoretical frequency of CPU made of nanotubes would be?
- btilly 14y ago
  The article claims that the transistors were 5x faster than existing transistors. And that is not the top possible performance.
tisme 14y ago
IBM is fantastic at using their research for PR, but it usually takes a very long time until these breakthrough announcements show up in products. The challenges on the road to competing with established tech for a completely new technology like this are formidable. An announcement like this is great but it is no reason to get overly excited just yet. Many other technologies have been proposed and have either disappeared or have found employment in niches (GaAs for instance), for now Silicium still holds a formidable edge when it comes to the most important measure of all: economy.
- devindotcom 14y ago
  This particular breakthrough product probably wouldn't start appearing in chips for at least 8 or 10 years, though. It's fine to get excited! Just don't think we're getting nanotubes in our phones next year. Changing materials is a huuuge step.
  - Symmetry 14y ago
    Right. I expect people to switch over to other materials only after improvements using silicon stop.
    - tisme 14y ago
      Even then it will have to make economic sense to switch. After all the equation is not x > y but $n using tech x buys more computing power than $n using tech y.
richardburton 14y ago
It looks like Warren Buffett's first major investment in a technology company is shaping up nicely.
mukaiji 14y ago
material scientist here. I've worked on carbon nanotubes (cnt if you want to sound cool) for a few years. Looking at them under the electron microscope, I've always wondered how in the hell we'd ever line them up without having to recourse to nano-tweezers (which of course is impractical if you want to scale to a few billion switches). Looks like IBM finally cracked a decent technique (though I suppose the device yield isn't that great), and it hopefully will be a path toward production. What would be really cool is if we can find economically-viable application for carbon nanotubes outside of semi-conductors. The biggest problem right now is their cost (~$400/gram for good purity [for reference: 20X the price of gold]) and the fact that platinum is used as a destructive catalyst to make them.
- carlob 14y ago
  Let me be nitpicky: the price of gold has gone up recently, it's now over 50$/g. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28400+%24%2Fg%29+%2F%28price+of+gold%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28400+%24%2Fg%29+%2F%2...
  - mukaiji 14y ago
    Ah, good catch! I remember a while back comparing CNT prices per gram versus gold and it was something like $20 a gram for gold. Must have been a low then. Thanks for catching it.
- Symmetry 14y ago
  Well, right now their yield is only 70% of the transistors, so effectively 0 for chips. Improving that is probably the biggest research breakthrough still remaining.
sophiabatka464 14y ago
Kyaa Super Kool Hain Hum 2012 is a very nice movie.The story follows Sid (Riteish Deshmukh) and Adi (Tusshar Kapoor), roommates and good friends. Adi is a struggling actor, whilst Sid is a struggling DJ who admires his own dog Suckru (in some versions Fuckru) more than himself. http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-2012-dvd-rip-free-download/ http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-... http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-2012-dvd-rip-free-download/ http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-... http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-2012-dvd-rip-free-download/ http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-... http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-2012-dvd-rip-free-download/ http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-... http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-2012-dvd-rip-free-download/ http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-...
Yuioup 14y ago
If this ever turns into a product, I hope they choose a more efficient design than x64. I'm assuming that ARM would be a good choice.
- vrotaru 14y ago
  They have they Power series of chips so it would be really weird if they were to choose x86 (even x86_64)
abtinf 14y ago
Articles like this used to excite me. But now, they are just sort of depressing. Would it be good to have denser transistor counts? Sure. There are lots of benefits for hardware. Denser transistors can mean (possibly) reduced power consumption from smaller chips. Manufacturing costs are reduced because you get more chips from the same materials. Device production costs are reduced because you can combine functions that used to take two chips into a single chip. Overall devices can be smaller. But from a software perspective, its a limited blessing. To be sure, there are benefits for cloud computing applications and other "embarrassingly parallel" applications. These chips might be great in data centers, which are power sensitive. And being able to do more things at once can be good, even if its at the same speed - Google can maybe crawl the web more frequently and video games might get improved graphics. But the thing is, we already have nearly unlimited computing power at our disposal. On a whim, I could spin up a hundred thousand computers on Amazon Web Services to do some desired computation (which would cost a mere $700/hr at the current spot prices). My laptop has a 192 core GPU which, by itself, is more powerful than most super computers that existed up to the mid-1990s. What we really need are software advances to exploit this hardware. For decades, there has been essentially no progress whatever in software that can take advantage of parallel computing. What techniques we have are either brittle (threads) or forfeit most of the hardware's power (multiple processes combined with relatively slow inter-process communication). Software is in such a backward state that people are amazed when the home-screen icons on an iphone scroll smoothly from page to page.
- illumen 14y ago
  Increasingly larger problems can be solved in the same time period. Processing is getting wider, but staying a similar speed... except IO - which has gone from 40MB/s to 1000MB/s for fairly cheap hardware. The network has also sped up in a major way, with terabits/s possible. Branch prediction allows us to follow multiple possible serial paths, and the wider our processors the more branches we can follow. Software advances have made it trivial for even beginner programmers to process many events in parallel. Automatic vectorizing compilers have been available for over a decade now. Transactional memory is becoming mainstream, with compiler support and even hardware support. Massive libraries of highly optimized maths and scientific routines are being developed by 1000s of people at once over the internet and made available for free. I don't think it's hard to use up all that power. Even on the cutting edge, gaining a 10x or 100x speed up is not unheard of. Problems are becoming more and more about the functionality required, and the vision, rather than being limited by the processing speed and power available. tldr; we are ok, and we're going to be ok.

204 points by sew 14y ago

article link http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nnano.2012.189.html http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nnano.... also more informative stories http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57541381-76/ibm-brings-carbon-nanotube-based-computers-a-step-closer/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57541381-76/ibm-brings-car... http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/newsid=27115.php http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/newsid=27115.php

stickfigure 14y ago

They have long since shrunk the switches to less than a wavelength of light Snort.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
wtallis 14y ago
What? Transistor sizes hit UV wavelengths around 1995, during the Pentium era. That's a reasonable statement to be making to provide context.
- ams6110 14y ago
  So "visible light" would have been more accurate, but probably assumed by most readers.
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  And there are constructive ways to provide that context, like how you did. "Snort" does not qualify.
  - frozenport 14y ago
    I think "snort" was a joke so that you wouldn't get angry :-)

nine_k 14y ago

TL;DR: IBM found a way to place nanotubes on silicon chips with some precision. Not yet perfect, but it's the best we got so far.

megaman821 14y ago

Any know what the theoretical frequency of CPU made of nanotubes would be?

btilly 14y ago
The article claims that the transistors were 5x faster than existing transistors. And that is not the top possible performance.

tisme 14y ago

IBM is fantastic at using their research for PR, but it usually takes a very long time until these breakthrough announcements show up in products. The challenges on the road to competing with established tech for a completely new technology like this are formidable. An announcement like this is great but it is no reason to get overly excited just yet. Many other technologies have been proposed and have either disappeared or have found employment in niches (GaAs for instance), for now Silicium still holds a formidable edge when it comes to the most important measure of all: economy.

devindotcom 14y ago
This particular breakthrough product probably wouldn't start appearing in chips for at least 8 or 10 years, though. It's fine to get excited! Just don't think we're getting nanotubes in our phones next year. Changing materials is a huuuge step.
- Symmetry 14y ago
  Right. I expect people to switch over to other materials only after improvements using silicon stop.
  - tisme 14y ago
    Even then it will have to make economic sense to switch. After all the equation is not x > y but $n using tech x buys more computing power than $n using tech y.

richardburton 14y ago

It looks like Warren Buffett's first major investment in a technology company is shaping up nicely.

mukaiji 14y ago

material scientist here. I've worked on carbon nanotubes (cnt if you want to sound cool) for a few years. Looking at them under the electron microscope, I've always wondered how in the hell we'd ever line them up without having to recourse to nano-tweezers (which of course is impractical if you want to scale to a few billion switches). Looks like IBM finally cracked a decent technique (though I suppose the device yield isn't that great), and it hopefully will be a path toward production. What would be really cool is if we can find economically-viable application for carbon nanotubes outside of semi-conductors. The biggest problem right now is their cost (~$400/gram for good purity [for reference: 20X the price of gold]) and the fact that platinum is used as a destructive catalyst to make them.

carlob 14y ago
Let me be nitpicky: the price of gold has gone up recently, it's now over 50$/g. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28400+%24%2Fg%29+%2F%28price+of+gold%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28400+%24%2Fg%29+%2F%2...
- mukaiji 14y ago
  Ah, good catch! I remember a while back comparing CNT prices per gram versus gold and it was something like $20 a gram for gold. Must have been a low then. Thanks for catching it.
Symmetry 14y ago
Well, right now their yield is only 70% of the transistors, so effectively 0 for chips. Improving that is probably the biggest research breakthrough still remaining.

sophiabatka464 14y ago

Kyaa Super Kool Hain Hum 2012 is a very nice movie.The story follows Sid (Riteish Deshmukh) and Adi (Tusshar Kapoor), roommates and good friends. Adi is a struggling actor, whilst Sid is a struggling DJ who admires his own dog Suckru (in some versions Fuckru) more than himself. http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-2012-dvd-rip-free-download/ http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-... http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-2012-dvd-rip-free-download/ http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-... http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-2012-dvd-rip-free-download/ http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-... http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-2012-dvd-rip-free-download/ http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-... http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-2012-dvd-rip-free-download/ http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/kyaa-super-kool-hain-hum-...

Yuioup 14y ago

If this ever turns into a product, I hope they choose a more efficient design than x64. I'm assuming that ARM would be a good choice.

vrotaru 14y ago
They have they Power series of chips so it would be really weird if they were to choose x86 (even x86_64)

abtinf 14y ago

Articles like this used to excite me. But now, they are just sort of depressing. Would it be good to have denser transistor counts? Sure. There are lots of benefits for hardware. Denser transistors can mean (possibly) reduced power consumption from smaller chips. Manufacturing costs are reduced because you get more chips from the same materials. Device production costs are reduced because you can combine functions that used to take two chips into a single chip. Overall devices can be smaller. But from a software perspective, its a limited blessing. To be sure, there are benefits for cloud computing applications and other "embarrassingly parallel" applications. These chips might be great in data centers, which are power sensitive. And being able to do more things at once can be good, even if its at the same speed - Google can maybe crawl the web more frequently and video games might get improved graphics. But the thing is, we already have nearly unlimited computing power at our disposal. On a whim, I could spin up a hundred thousand computers on Amazon Web Services to do some desired computation (which would cost a mere $700/hr at the current spot prices). My laptop has a 192 core GPU which, by itself, is more powerful than most super computers that existed up to the mid-1990s. What we really need are software advances to exploit this hardware. For decades, there has been essentially no progress whatever in software that can take advantage of parallel computing. What techniques we have are either brittle (threads) or forfeit most of the hardware's power (multiple processes combined with relatively slow inter-process communication). Software is in such a backward state that people are amazed when the home-screen icons on an iphone scroll smoothly from page to page.

illumen 14y ago
Increasingly larger problems can be solved in the same time period. Processing is getting wider, but staying a similar speed... except IO - which has gone from 40MB/s to 1000MB/s for fairly cheap hardware. The network has also sped up in a major way, with terabits/s possible. Branch prediction allows us to follow multiple possible serial paths, and the wider our processors the more branches we can follow. Software advances have made it trivial for even beginner programmers to process many events in parallel. Automatic vectorizing compilers have been available for over a decade now. Transactional memory is becoming mainstream, with compiler support and even hardware support. Massive libraries of highly optimized maths and scientific routines are being developed by 1000s of people at once over the internet and made available for free. I don't think it's hard to use up all that power. Even on the cutting edge, gaining a 10x or 100x speed up is not unheard of. Problems are becoming more and more about the functionality required, and the vision, rather than being limited by the processing speed and power available. tldr; we are ok, and we're going to be ok.