Posted 11/18/09 at 07:27:22 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Moore’s Law states that approximately every two years, the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles. This has held true for the last 50 years. But there will come a point one day when physics puts a stop to that. Eventually the boundaries of atomic scale will limit transistor density. However, a new breakthrough in the field of quantum computing may provide hope for future advances. Until now, a quantum computing device had to be designed for one, and only one, operation. But scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have constructed the first programmable quantum processor.

Quantum processing units are fundamentally different in a number of ways. First, where a regular bit can be only 1 or 0, a quantum bit (or qubit) only assumes a value of 1 or 0 when it is observed. Additionally, Quantum computers aren’t bound by Boolean operators like ‘and, ‘or’ and ‘not’. Finally, two qubits can be “entangled”, meaning they will always have the same value when observed, even if separated.

The NIST computer consists of two quantum gates, one single qubit gate and an entangled two qubit gate. The gates utilized two beryllium ions stimulated with UV lasers to represent operations. The test programs run came back with 79% correct results. Certainly not perfect, but a huge step forward. You won’t be dropping one of these into a socket on your motherboard anytime soon, but maybe someday.

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Posted 09/10/09 at 12:00:00 PM by Loyd Case

Francois Piednoel is worried.

For those of you who have never met Francois, he’s a member of the performance marketing team at Intel. It’s always entertaining to carry on a conversation with Francois. He was the guy at Intel who first steered me to the idea of building small systems around an X58 micro ATX motherboard and undervolting the CPU while maintaining the reference clock speed. This is sort of the inverse of overclocking, and results in pretty high performance systems that run cooler and quieter than the norm. What worries Piednoel, though, is this: what are desktop users ever going to do with six cores?

Moore’s Law means we get more CPUs with more and more transistors. Or we get smaller CPUs with the same number of transistors as past products. But what are the practical benefits for users?

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Posted 06/16/09 at 04:00:10 PM by Paul Lilly

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore once predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every 18 to 24 months, a prediction which has been famously dubbed Moore's Law. But according to market research firm iSuppli, the move to 18nm will signal the end of Moore's Law.

"The usable limit for semiconductor process technology will be reached when chip process geometries shrink to be smaller than 20nm, to 18nm nodes," said Len Jelinek, director and chief analyst, semiconductor manufacturing, for iSuppli. "At those nodes, the industry will start getting to the point where semiconductor manufacturing tools are too expensive to depreciate with volume production, i.e., their costs will be so high, that the value of their lifetime productivity can never justify it."

So when exactly will it happen? According to iSupply, in the year 2014. In 2007, Gordon Moore said his prediction could be upheld for at least another decade. Five years from now, one of them is going to be wrong.

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