Peter St. John wrote:
Joe Landman wrote:
"...if you buy into the notion that there may in fact be some
fundamental physical limits on Moore's law due to the nasty combination
of thermodynamics (stability of small structures with respect to
temperature, and resistance of same to defect formation), and quantum
mechanics ..."
Yeah I buy into that. I figure that there's a ceiling of so many
Deliverable FLOPS per Cubic Angstrom? And I wonder if something like
heh...
Nonvolatile Memory vs Processing Bits per Second are sortof a Heisenberg
Dual; if you want a bit carved in stone, so it will still be there when
you look later, you won't be able to process it as fast as someting
transient. So you could maximize the amount of FLOPS in a milliliter, or
the amount of RAM, but not both.
:)
So maybe the ceiling will be (Deliverable FLOPS times Recoverable Bytes)/ml
I rather like the Strossian MIPS per kilogram ... :)
I think acheiving zero degrees kelvin, watching time zero in a
telescope, and the ceiling for DP are all kinda the same thing, and
we'll entertain ourselves reducing temp below 0.001K (whatever) and
watching t < 0.00001 sec and so on, for decades. Maybe we got within a
certain kind of ballpark of 0K first, now we're getting to the ballpark
of time 0 cosmologically, and maybe in a few decades we'll get in the
ballpark of Max DFLOPSRB/ML (tm).
Robert?
Unfortunately the issue of thermodynamic stability of small structures
is more of an issue. It is also, unfortunately, not science fiction.
Defects happen.
Back when blue LEDs were being developed, they had an interesting
thermodynamic stability problem. They would destroy themselves in a few
minutes of operation due to threading defects. That is, the barrier to
migration was low enough that at 300K, they would start ripping
themselves to shreds. Took a few years (and some materials changes) to
fix this.
Thermodynamics: its not just a good idea, its the law.
(3 or 4, I forget)
Zeroth: You must play the game.
First: You can't win.
Second: You can't break even.
Third: You can't quit the game.
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax : +1 734 786 8452 or +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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