Given that there are 1 billion nanometers in a meter, we’re talking some very small transistors here.
Need something to help you imagine that? A typical human hair is 100,000 nanometers across so a single transistor is to that hair as a 2.5-mile stretch is to the circumference of the earth.
Repeat: we’re talking about seriously small transistors.
But there are good reasons why Intel and other big chip makers will spend many billions of dollars to shrink chips down from the current state of the art — 45 nm — to the 10 nm level.
Smaller circuits use less power to do more calculations more quickly. The ability to cram more stuff into less space explains why today’s smartphones are more powerful than computers that used to fill entire rooms.
More shrinkage (along with some other breakthroughs) will make tomorrow’s smart phones (or whatever we call them then) nearly as powerful as today’s supercomputers — or at least that’s the word from Pat Gelsinger, VP of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group.
Gelsinger spoke to reporters Monday to preview Intel’s plans for celebrating its 40th birthday, but according to ChannelWeb, he mixed memories of the past with some juicy predictions about the future.
Gelsinger’s remaining predictions were more abstract in nature. He said that better parallel programming for current multi-core processors and future ones would lead to “terascale computing at the level of everyone’s personal computer.” Intel’s and others’ work in simplifying tool kits for software developers to take advantage of multi-threading on multi-core processors would pay off for certain classes of workloads such as visual computing, he said.
One payoff end-users should expect fairly soon is “a dramatic restructuring of the user interface” that is immersive, intuitive and interactive. Asked whether he expectedMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Apple (NSDQ:AAPL) or somebody like to Nintendo to drive that evolution of the interface, Gelsinger again demurred, saying, “In Intel’s history, we’ve never been good at picking the next user interface or killer app.”
Popularity: 1% [?]
Entries (RSS)