[extropy-chat] Computing Power: Moore's Law keeps going and going and going

[Robert Bradbury]

Intel started selling the Pentium D processors based on 65nm technology in
Dec. 2005 [1].  They announced yesterday that it is now able to manufacture
1 billion transistor memory chips at the 45nm scale [2,3] and plans to
introduce them in 2nd half of 2007.

Interestingly, AMD announced an alliance with Integrated Silicon which may
lead to using Z-RAM for its 65nm chip caches (allowing caches to be 5x
larger) [4,5].

IBM, Sony and Toshiba have started work on the 32nm Cell (the multiprocessor
in the Playstation 3) [6] and Taiwan Semiconductor has announced it has
started preparing for 22nm lithography (having started 65nm production last
year) [7].

In the meantime Intel is working with QinetiQ producing InSb 85nm
transistors which they hope will have 1.5x the speed at 1/10th the power
[8].

The scale seems to be going 90nm, 65nm, 45nm, 32nm, 22nm, 16nm for those who
are interested.  The picture for the 16nm scale and those thereafter
(post-2015) gets a bit fuzzy...  But more and more it looks like people are
going to have at least hundreds of GFLOPS of processor power, wearable,
powered by fuel cells sucking glucose out of your blood stream within the
next 10 years *without* "real" nanotechnology.

Gives rise to whole new lines of thought -- parent to child, "Mary, you are
getting thin, you either need to eat more or turn down the clock rate on
your exoprocessors."

Robert

1. http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/12/27/intel_announces_pentium_ee_955/
2. http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/25/intel_announces_45nm_sram/
3. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060125/tc_nm/intel_chip_dc
4. http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2006Jan/gee20060124034376.htm
5. http://www.eet.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=177101749
6. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/12/ibm_sony_toshiba_32nm_cell/
7. http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/16/tsmc_22nm_production/
8. http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20051207211955.html
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