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>The emerging printing technology poses a heretical idea: Rather than squeezing more transistors into the same small space, why not smear the transistors across
by learc83 14y ago
>The emerging printing technology poses a heretical idea: Rather than squeezing more transistors into the same small space, why not smear the transistors across a much larger surface?
Did they forget about the speed of light?
- zdw 14y agoThis isn't for performance, it's for the capability at all. Would you rather have: 1. No ability to create your own silicon logic outside of FPGA/CPLD chips or having an ASIC fabbed, all of which tend to be very high cost per unit and have large board outlines, and are limited in i/o by the predefined capabilities of the chip? 2. The ability to whip out cheap prototypes whose performance is nowhere near state of the art in a few hours with a laser printer style device onto substrates on an arbitrary surface. New tech is frequently disruptive in ways different from how things were envisioned - for example, I doubt people reading Stephenson's "Diamond Age" would have envisioned the plastic PLA/ABS fiber printers as the first major incarnation of the 3D printing revolution.
- jes5199 14y agoI don't have a good mental model for this. What sorts of problems are more suited to a network of tiny ICs rather than a FPGA or a microprocessor?