[ExI] Moore's Law

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, 21 Mar 2013, John Clark wrote:

[...]
> Maybe its different this time and it really is the end, or maybe 
> monolithic 3D technology will save the day. Or Spintronics, devices that 
> for the first time make use of the fact that electrons not only have an 
> electrical charge but the particles also have a spin. Or maybe 
> memristors, the fourth passive 2 terminal electrical component after 
> resistors, capacitors and inductors. Or maybe it will be Quantum 
> Computers.

Lots of "maybes", Mr Clark. It is hard to build any reasonable prediction 
on that, if you ask me. There is lots of talking about breakthroughs and 
solutions. Not so much about construction or production. Even less about 
applications in real life. Either it is all classified (so why make all 
the fuss in the media) or it is not as great as they say.

So I think I will wait and see what happens. Of course I wouldn't mind 
having quantum Pentium. But can it run my Linux distro for a week without 
decoherenting itself? No? It's a coprocessor? Ok, so can it run my other 
code for a week long computation? Yes, there are some research saying QC 
will not solve all that many problems, only some of them it will solve 
faster. They don't say what kind of faster, AFAIK.

Of course I am not QC specialist. And I might have read wrong websites and 
not recently.

[...]
> There was even a article on the most radical sort of Quantum computer, a 
> Topological Quantum Computer using non-Abelian pseudo-particles, and 
> even here they report "substantial progress in this field".

I understand it was theoretical breakthrough?

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **