Ramblings of a Prophet

So a wise man estimated that every 18 months, computing power in micro-devices doubles, which has turned out to be almost dead on.  This is illustrated by the current technology community, almost every 3 months the two main graphics companies, Nvidia and ATI (part of AMD), come out with the “latest and greatest” graphics card, almost without fail.

For a long while graphics cards by both companies were very similar, both in form and function.  Until recently where they could print the silicon even smaller, the cores of the cards were very similar, and consumed minuscule amounts of power, requiring small and low profile heat sinks, but now days the cores are printed even smaller, and consume obscene amounts of power, so they require large, and often elaborate, heat sinks. On older cards they would have one core per card, and usually have a small amount of ram on-board and would share some of the system ram, but the modern cards can have two cores per card and another micro processor on there to divi up the tasks, if you will, and the modern cards can support much more ram on-board, sometimes as much as the system ram.

Some theorists believe we have almost reach the maximum processing power for silicon chips, but i don’t think so, the current big-and-bad chip has near 1 billion individual transistors, whereas the chips of the last decade hadn’t even reached 50 million.  As far as speed goes we are bumping up against the speed limitations of silicon based transistors due to physical limitations, without being actually chilled, the maximum speed is approximately 4.5-5 GHz depending on the manufacturing process of the chip (i.e. 95nm, 65nm, 45nm, ect…).  In theory the actual transistors could switch up to about 100 GHz, but without being chilled, the heat generated by the chip would fry the chip before it even traveled the distance to the heat sink, all of maybe 1mm.  with those in mind you would think, oh, to get more power lets just stick a chiller on each chip and run them really fast, but at that point every little microscopic impurity in the silicon could potentially ruin the chip, one molecule of dirt could potentially ruin an entire chip, and also above 5GHz silicon changes its properties slightly and becomes unpredictable.  Yet another thing working against it is the trace lengths, even a 1mm long wire could potentially have an effect, despite the fact that electricity travels about half the speed of light in wire, at the speeds the chip would be running that could potentially have a huge effect.  So designers can’t go too much faster with the chips, so they compensate by adding millions of transistors.

I have really no idea what to blog about, but i will give you a try, just for all my loyal readers, hahaha, not…

So this is really my first blog, in any format, myspace, or otherwise.  I guess im pretty stoked about blogging, sounds pretty cool, lot of potentional.