I remember back in the late 1980's, seeing a billboard advertising IBM's studly computer power. In huge words, the billboard proclaimed: "17 MIPS Zone!"
Nvidia is announcing that by the end of next year, they'll have a chip with (Brian Wang calculates) about 1.5 Teraflops. That's 100,000 times as fast.
Even for someone who grew up knowing Moore's Law and laughing at how the old science fiction writers put room-sized computers in space ships, every once in a while my mind gets blown by just how fast computers are getting.
The other thing that impressed me is that this chip will be made with a 28 nm process. The smallest patterned feature on this chip will be smaller than most viruses. And I'm guessing it'll have somewhere around a billion of those features.
(If I remember right, back in the late 80's, the smallest feature on a chip was over 1,000 nm.)
Back in 1998 when I first heard about nanotechnology, there was basically no way to build things that size. Now, industry is doing it.
I don't have a nice conclusion for this post. I just was impressed enough to want to write and say, Wow.
I completely agree with you that our rate of progress in nanotechnology is pretty amazing. I grew up in the 90s and I always used to marvel at how my game boy could produce an image on its greenish-black screen. Now we've got ipods and other hand held game devices that have chips powerful enough to present full-color, realistic graphics. Just one of the many areas in which the size decrease, and power increase, of computer chips is readily apparent.
Posted by: Pat | October 21, 2010 at 04:57 PM
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Posted by: zhang | November 24, 2010 at 06:21 PM