Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[Train Guy]

A teraflop be enough for you? The current stuff is already starting to get ahead of what people need, let alone what is coming down the road in a few years.

-- "To maintain performance growth with stunted per-core and per-thread performance growth rates, we must have a more rapid increase in the number of cores per die," said Donofrio. This places unprecedented requirements on the corresponding growth of "off-chip" bandwidth. Donofrio said that off-chip signaling frequencies are likely to exceed the frequency of processor cores in the not-too-distant future. "By increasing the number of cores, I'm convinced that a one-Teraflop multiprocessor die with one-Terabyte of "off-chip" bandwidth is feasible — at reasonable cost — before the end of this decade. (snip)

He cited developments from IBM Labs to support his case. Scientists at the Almaden Research Lab in San Jose have constructed the world's smallest working computer circuits (12 by 17 nm) by deploying carbon monoxide molecules on an atomic copper surface arranged, more or less, as a sequence of toppling dominoes. "The technique, called molecular cascade, explores the far reaches of science to find ways to harness the quirky behavior of atoms, molecules and quantum spins as alternatives to silicon."

Using this technique, scientists were able to build a typical six-transistor SRAM cell in 90 nanometer technology occupying a square micron and working digital-logic elements about 260-thousand-times smaller than those used in today's most advanced semiconductor chips.

http://www.eet.com/semi/news/OEG20040216S0007