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Underground > Laboratory >

Moore's Law Exceeded

15:45 / 21.06.06

IBM have got a new computer chip that operates at roughly 350 GHZ at room temperature, but chuck it into a bucket of liquid nitrogen, you can overclock it to 500GHZ!!!1!1!! The 350 GHZ version could be in a desktop PC up to 2 years away, so I guess Intel and AMD are in a bit of a tizz right now? The IBM Lab boffins also have plans to go back to the drawing board and pump it up to 1 THZ (Terahertz). This could mean massive leaps and bounds in all forms of technology. Bring on theee singularity!!! Whaddya reckon?

I guess from a pure technological point of veiw, speeds of this size could mean the end of raw programming as we know it. Object orientated programming needs these speeds and it could mean that anyone could build their own program to suit using pre existing modules. When resources such as speed and memory are no problem, software can be brought to life. Much like Barbelith

MWhahahahahahaha

16:09 / 21.06.06

yeah, all we'll need is a portable domestic supply of liquid nitrogen instead...

17:35 / 21.06.06

What's OOP again? That link intimidates me.

17:50 / 21.06.06

OK,

Here is theWiki on the OOP. I did a (failed) year of computer science about 13 years ago and I actually came up with this myself as a concept. I knew programming was not for me, hence the failure and I also knew that once CPU speeds got high enough, programmers would write programs for creating programs. The entire system needs really high processing speeds in order to run the massive amounts of required sub routines needed to make the end program work properly.

18:46 / 21.06.06

I've always thought that Kurzweil's concept of a Singuality was weak beyond words, to be honest - I don't get closer to the Moon by climbing bigger trees - so I tend to be a sceptic about claims made for the significance of new advances in computing.

The focus on advances in software as being at least as important as hardware is correct, imho, though OOP is now standard and has been for several years, hasn't it? Its always nice to have lots of speed, but the main beneficiaries are gamers. Which is no bad thing, of course.

Crux Is This City's Protector.

19:30 / 21.06.06

I suspect there's some slight confusion. Object-oriented programming doesn't really have anything to do with programs that write themselves, or any such real AI/singularity type futurism. It is, indeed, the standard in many areas, and relatively uncontroversially so; nevertheless, OO concepts like inheritence, encapsulation and the like are very much in the domain of 'raw' programming. They bring greater abstraction, and force the programmer to consider the software he works with as a system, rather than a set of states or functions--but as a paradigm shift I think it's safe to say that OO's influence is mostly within the realm of software development.

A new style of chip (as pertains to its manufacture, rather than its function; 500GHz are much less impressive, paradigmatically, than quantum bits over the regular kind) is exciting, but its potential for revolution is much more mundane: smaller, cheaper, faster versions of what we have now. The potential for linear development of power (within Moore's law or without) to produce qualitative leaps in computing -- such as Strong AI -- has, I think, at this point been relatively discredited. The progression from current software methods to self-aware machines or recursively improving programs is a nontrivial one.

Crux Is This City's Protector.

19:38 / 21.06.06

Just to clarify:

Strong AI, Quantum computing and the like is all still controversial, and I do not represent my opinion as fact.

The basic definition of Object Oriented Programming and its relationship to / relative demands for processor speed are relatively uncontroversial, and I do represent my opinion as fact, more or less.

21:44 / 22.06.06

Re the 500 GHz processor, these reports are mostly hype. There's a good discussion about it over at Ars Technica. This speed is not a processor clock speed, they got transistors to switch at that speed, and there's some odd mojo that they have to do to manage it. Either way, it's very unlikely that you will see this in a desktop in the forseeable future - these transistors are designed for analog RF circuits (you might see it in your mobile phone, for example).

17:32 / 23.06.06

Dang... Was looking forward to playing all my games on a souped up mbile phone too... sheesh, creative journo's suck. IBM prolly wanted a stock hump.

18:57 / 06.07.06

With regard to OOP, as others have mentioned, the primary advantage is that once you have an object that represents some part of the world or of your problem, you can manipulate that object at a higher level of abstraction - the object keeps track of its own state and the operations that it can perform so that you don't have to.

The thing that is significant about this model of programming is that instead of being limited to a relatively low-level programming language to perform a certain task, objects effectively extend the language that is available to you. Object-oriented languages both allow you to "speak" in the extended language that others have provided, and to extend the language yourself. Earlier programming paradigms could only really extend the language with functions, and at a certain point the organization of such functions becomes a logistical nightmare, because the user is forced to keep track of the data. Since objects keep track of their own data, you avoid this problem and are able to model progressively more complex systems.

19:11 / 06.07.06

I really want either an analogy or a real-world example of what you just said.

06:34 / 07.07.06

A motor object might understand the commands start and stop and the query is_running. The actual details of how the motor is started or stopped programmatically - it may involve writing data to a special place in the computer's memory or instead require that a message be sent over the internet - is hidden from the programmer seeking to control the motor. That programmer merely writes moter.start and expects either the motor to start or to receive notification that some error has occurred.

Being able to say

if not motor.is_running then motor.start

is very convenient. It's modular. A motor object controlling one specific type of motor can be replaced by another without changing the rest of the program in any way.

In addition to such modularity and data hiding (we don't know the details of how the motor starts itself, we can only tell it to do so and verify that it happens) object oriented programming languages normally provide a means to extend one object to make another of a similar but extended type. This is called inheritance. A regulated_motor might extend the motor with a get_current_temperature query that allows the controlling program to monitor its running temperature and a set_maximum_temperature command, setting a cut-off temperature above which the motor will automatically turn itself off. In all other ways a regulated_motor is just a normal motor and can be interacted with as such.

Another feature of object oriented programming languages is polymorphism. This means that how an object responds to a command can depend on the kind of data the command includes. A regulated_motor's cut-off temperature may be stored internally in Kelvin, and all internal calculations will be carried out in that unit, but if the set_maximum_temperature command includes Celsius or Fahrenheit temperature data then that data will be understood and be converted to Kelvin internally. This again helps to minimise the restriction that different parts of a program speak exactly the same language, making the system more flexible.

Hope that's some help, grant.

10:01 / 09.07.06

Also, Moore's Law states that the number of transitors in an integrated circuit will double. It doesn't really cover raw computing power, or speed, simply the complexity of the logic circuits built.

It's not bad work by IBM, but it's not a commercial desktop processor running at 500Ghz, by any means. We'll have to wait a few more years for that yet.

07:30 / 17.01.07

Wooooo!

An 8 fold increase in transistors by 2008! Take that Moore's Law you outdated piece of crap. That's 8 times more in 12 months, as opposed to double in 18.

Or more creative journalists? Or HP want another stock hump?