5 Jun
2013
5 Jun
'13
12:10 a.m.
On 05/06/2013 01:18, Liam Proven wrote:
On 4 June 2013 22:46, Fred Cisin <cisin at
xenosoft.com> wrote:
At a recent Computer Conservation Society talk in Manchester, England a
researcher at Salford University said in essence we are already at that
stage. What he actually said was that the conductors are now so small
that quantum effects mean that only 80% (I think it was 80%) of the
electrons that form a current travel within the conductor and if it were
any smaller it would cease to be a conductor. I think he also said that
the difference between a 1-bit and a 0-bit in modern RAM is about 19
electrons....
... I am going to do some more digging but it looks as if recent changes
in CPU architecture have really involved shuffling round things within
the design and using bigger chips rather than reducing the size of the
components
--
Dave Wade G4UGM
Illegitimi Non Carborundum
For those so OCD as to have clear space, howzbout
we reinvent "the
desktop"!
The serious question is: why.
If current trends continue, discrete GPUs are going away, integrated
into the chipset. Motherboard logic is going away too - e.g. the
latest "Haswell" Intel Core CPUs now incorporate the voltage
regulators on the die as well. More and more is getting built into the
CPU as a way to use the extra transistors that Moore's Law keeps
delivering, until soon enough, there will be about 3 components to a
PC: a CPU containing all the logic and some storage chips - some RAM
and some Flash.
The next step after that is to integrate those into the CPU die too,
partly to shorten the buses and increase speed, partly to save cost
and improve reliability. Or memristors will kick in and the difference
between volatile and nonvolatile storage will disappear.
Then you have one chip, basically, and some power and some cooling.
There will be relatively slow external serial buses - some descendant
of Intel Lightning, perhaps, quick enough for slow third-level
storage, sound and video, but not for adding a different GPU.
Once we get there, why would you want or need a big box any more? What
would be the point? Frankly, today, only hobbyists & specialist
workers change GPU or sound card - for most users, the built-in stuff
is fine. Which is another part of the reason for the rise in notebook
sales and the drop in desktop sales, because for nonspecialist users,
notebooks are good enough now.
The trend of increasing integration has continued for as long as just
about anyone on this list has been alive, and I'm aware we have some
septuagenarians. Why should it slow now?
We already have 6-physical-core 12-logical-core chips with powerful
onboard GPUs, memory controllers, bus controllers, VRMs and most of
the rest of the computer on the die. There are server x86-64 CPUs with
16 physical cores. There are specialist MIPS chips with 64 cores.
That trend is going to continue until your general-purpose PC is just
as sealed and non-expandable as an iPad. All you'll be able to do is
add slower third-level (I'm not counting caches here) storage.
The big looming limit is when photolithography stops being able to
make smaller features.