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Originally Posted by jaydee116
Your thinking to narrow minded. From what I have read the developers are thinking a little more optimistically. They want a PC the size of a cell phone 10 times faster than any normal computer today. With nano biological tech they are developing it will be a reality. Think outside of what they are doing/capable of today.
Or maybe I am over optimistic but I feel there will be major changes in tech in our life time. We will see though. Look how far we have came in the last 50 years. CPU have been around what 30 years maybe? They are just getting started with the development of them.
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Ever since the transistor was invented, the improvements in physical electronics technology have come from making the transistors smaller, and smaller, and smaller. And that's about it, really. LCD's are new I guess. The last big physical change in the formulation of semiconductors was the adoption of gallium arsenide. I have heard a lot about bio-computers, photonic switched computers, etc. Quantum qubit computers would radically alter what we define as a "computer" and make encryption incredibly secure. I can barely understand qubit switching, it goes to the heart of very strange quantum mechanics principles such as Heisenberg Uncertainty, DeBroglie wavelength...I do think outside the box on these issues. Especially about superconducting switches. ("cryotrons" is what they are called in SC lingo) Don't get me wrong, I dig your optimism about the future.
But so far, the cynic about progress in me has been more right than wrong. What has come to market so far has been taking silicon transistors, shrinking them, and cramming more on the same 400mm wafers Intel and the like have been using for more than fifteen years. That is the benchmark of the business model: yield per wafer. And they have scaled in power consumption and heat output in a very linear fashion over the same period of time. Laptop processors consume less power because they are "smart." I.E., they throttle down clock frequency and voltage on the fly to maintain the battery. I mean, if I'm only running Outlook, then I don't need three billion clock cycles a second. But that's about it. The physical technology is the same though. Look at a heatsink for a Pentium and compare it to a heatsink for a P-IV, big difference. Heck, 386'es didn't even have a heatsink!