- #1
FishmanGeertz
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The smallest current retail microprocessor is 32nm (nanometers) in fabrication. Electronic engineers are struggling to make transistors smaller and smaller as the laws of physics dictate that there is a limit to how small you can make a transistor. Later this year, consumer hardware manufacturers such as Intel, AMD, NVidia and ATI, are making 28nm chips. Making them any smaller than that could be extremely difficult.
What will electronic engineers and computer giants do to further increase the performance and efficiency of microprocessors after the absolute ceiling of Moore's law has been reached? I've read stories about how they're actually going to try and stack transistors atop of each other. There are also some other theoretical technologies and methods of improving computational performance and efficiency in microchips without making the chip smaller and smaller.
I'm sure they have plenty of ideas of their sleeves that we don't know about.
Ballistic deflection transistors is one of them. Instead of using electrical currents to switch transistors on and off, BDT uses tiny pulses of light. This technology could allow microprocessors to theoretically run at speeds of Terahertz and generate very low amounts of heat. We struggle to cool our CPU's at speeds past 3.0 GHz, which is why overclocking past that requires radical cooling.
Imagine having an 80-core CPU with each core running at something like 40.0 THz using an application which can actually fully utilize such awesome computational horsepower. Crysis 3? Not to mention other computer components could be made from the same technology, such as graphics cards.
Here is a link about some good info regarding ballistic deflection transistors.
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2585
So far, nobody has been able to make a working prototype or "proof of concept" model.
What will electronic engineers and computer giants do to further increase the performance and efficiency of microprocessors after the absolute ceiling of Moore's law has been reached? I've read stories about how they're actually going to try and stack transistors atop of each other. There are also some other theoretical technologies and methods of improving computational performance and efficiency in microchips without making the chip smaller and smaller.
I'm sure they have plenty of ideas of their sleeves that we don't know about.
Ballistic deflection transistors is one of them. Instead of using electrical currents to switch transistors on and off, BDT uses tiny pulses of light. This technology could allow microprocessors to theoretically run at speeds of Terahertz and generate very low amounts of heat. We struggle to cool our CPU's at speeds past 3.0 GHz, which is why overclocking past that requires radical cooling.
Imagine having an 80-core CPU with each core running at something like 40.0 THz using an application which can actually fully utilize such awesome computational horsepower. Crysis 3? Not to mention other computer components could be made from the same technology, such as graphics cards.
Here is a link about some good info regarding ballistic deflection transistors.
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2585
So far, nobody has been able to make a working prototype or "proof of concept" model.
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