Moore's law is back on, baby.

JasonOfOrillia: Moore's law is back on, baby.

Has Moore's law ever not delivered? As if I recall it's just transistor count rather than actual horsepower, so just continually adding cores could meet the requirement.

sarah_t_s: As if I recall it's just transistor count rather than actual horsepower,

Transistor density, actually. But it's not really a formal thing, either. More of a rule-of-thumb.

Meh. Moore's law (as commonly held, not the original definition) is that either the cost per computation halves every two years.

For much of the history of the computer, this law has been more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy where manufactures have raced to meet its expectations.

I'm really looking forward to what happens when we hit fundamental physical limits for electronics and have to find something else.

Err, take out that unnecessary 'either', please.

Unsung_Hero: .

I'm really looking forward to what happens when we hit fundamental physical limits for electronics and have to find something else.

I think once we hit a physical limit for how much you can cram in a single bit of silicon then we'll see an annual leap in the number of cores packaged together. We're already seeing both AMD and Intel pushing lower clock speeds but more parallelism for quite a while,

Once we hit the limit they want to go to for packaging we'll be heading back towards multiple sockets on a single board, assuming no breakthroughs in manufacturing techniques.

And that computer will spend 99.9% of its time idle as your too busy fapping to cheap porn to play Crysis on it.

Unsung_Hero: and have to find something else.

We've found the something else- quantum computing. At that point, we'll be able to make computers that actually are at the physical limits of computation (barring some sort of string-theory based computer in the future).

Trying way too hard, subby.

This sounds cool but expensive for mass-production. And speaking of cooling, when you're cutting circuits this tiny, don't you start having problems dissipating heat as well as dampening crosstalk between parallel circuits in the finished processor?

Also, the term: "precision mechatronics" just gives me a techno-boner, just from the sound of it.

Unsung_Hero: I'm really looking forward to what happens when we hit fundamental physical limits for electronics and have to find something else.

at that point we'll probably have computronium, and it won't matter.

Isn't there some sort of source-drain tunneling problem with smaller fab devices?

sarah_t_s: And that computer will spend 99.9% of its time idle as you're too busy fapping to cheapfree porn to play Crysis on it.

If you're paying for porn on the internet, you're doing it wrong.

Meh - there's a couple more tricks in the bag they didn't mention, maybe because they aren't aware of them yet.

There's an evanescent wave trick that might net you something like a x4 improvement over diffraction limits, then there's an overall fix that's not quite public yet - too valuable for other uses - that is the spook holy grail at the moment. By the time it's needed maybe they'll release it.

Effectively, you can sidestep the entire diffraction limit issue insofar as the aperture of the lens goes. You still have some limits regarding the illuminating wavelength. But the apparent aperture goes to infinity. This is rather popular over at the NRO at the moment.

Man On Fire: Unsung_Hero: I'm really looking forward to what happens when we hit fundamental physical limits for electronics and have to find something else.

at that point we'll probably have computronium, and it won't matter.

Computronium you say? Isn't that the material that Colonel Computron is made out of?

I know all the words in the headline individually, but have NO idea what the hell they mean in that order, subby.