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btw: Is IEEE spectrum worth reading?
Let's hope they are willing to pump enogh money into it so it can get into production fast.45nm is the near future
I dont love intel at all. Actually I hate it.I think intel is a horrible company for keeping alive a outdated and inefficient computer architecture called x86.I want my IBM/Toshiba/Sony Cell based computer. But a PPC based computer is not bad either. My lab got 4 ps3 and a cell blade and a single cell processor performance it just owns the quad core in my laptop (using the same program but with different builds). I think all that new semiconductor technology developed by intel is awesome but alone it is far from being revolutonary. The performace boost is not that much due to the outdated architecture. But the numbers can easily seduce the ignorant masses. (I understand the to change the standard from x86 to cell requires a lot of money, specially from the software developers, but for progress some sacrifices must be done).
Once the fabrication machinery improves to where it can etch really small, we may see a shift back to silicon.
The big money consideration is not the software developers, but the actual hardware. This is prevalent in any category of electronics, not just CPUs. Companies like Intel decide which technology is currently the most viable, spend billions on fabrication facilities, and then improve that technology for several years before even considering moving to a new one, because that means making entirely new facilities. That's the price you pay for cheap computer parts - they've refined the technology so well and invested so much money in their facilities ahead of time. You may have heard about the flash technology that is better than today's in every way (it's magnetic based so it doesn't have "cycles" and retains its memory without power, meaning we would have instant boot times). Unfortunately, the technology rolled around after all the major flash memory companies had just finished investing a ton of money in fabrication plants for the current type of flash memory, so it will be another 4 or 5 years before they move onto that kind of technology.