From time to time in my writing I have made reference to Moore's Law; which, phrased simply, means "the power of computers doubles every 18 months" (some say two years). I like Moore's Law-- smaller, faster, double the power (and often, power consumption is lower too).
Moore's Law is most often comes up when speaking about CPU's (your computer's "brain"). My first Intel computer ran a very good CPU-- a 486 DX (at 133MHz [that's .1GHz]). It had a million transistor on it, and was considered Top of the Line.
Today's Top of the Line consumer chip is actually four-CPU's-in-one (or, "quad-core") and runs at just over 3GHz.
I don't think you have to be particularly good with numbers, nor particularly geeky, to see that there's been some improvement since the 486.
Just the other day, in an article about chip-maker AMD and corrupt European Socialist bureaucrats (EU punishes Intel+corruption, greed, gov’t) it was mentioned that chip-maker Intel had produced the fastest chip ever.
I like fast, so I looked into it.
The chip is capable of performing a trillion calculations a second (called a "teraflop"), is the size of a fingernail, and has 80 cores. Oh yeah, and it's dialed-down to 3GHz but can handle 6.
Wow.
The condensed (sound bite) details of the new (and yes, revolutionary) chip design can be read here, Intel Will Revolutionize Computing with the Fastest Chip Ever. And Intel's press release version (detailed) can be read here.
Intel says we'll see it in our devices in "about 5 years" (Boo!).
* The electrical outage mentioned yesterday has not been truly resolved, but hopefully, Tech--for Everyone will appear as usual. Y'all have a good weekend now. Ya' hear?
Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved.
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