IBM introduces carbon nanotube transistors to replace silicon in CPUs

ack

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Folsom

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Oh, don't worry, I'm sure software companies will find a way to dull up their operation with lazy programming...

There's no good reason why our typical computers today can't operate considerably faster, if it weren't for the laziness of software these days...

But on a side note, it's really cool.
 

jfrech

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Oh, don't worry, I'm sure software companies will find a way to dull up their operation with lazy programming...

There's no good reason why our typical computers today can't operate considerably faster, if it weren't for the laziness of software these days...

But on a side note, it's really cool.

We're kinda hurling a accusation with out much data. Some of us here work for the companies you're taking a shot at...I want to respect your opinion...just I take it as a bit of a harsh statement at the moment. Respectfully, John
 

Tech Guy

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I read about this about a decade ago. I just figured they had given up, or just developed better silicon solutions. On the surface, a mechanical computer sounds bizarre, but given the dimensions involved, there could be some interesting developments afoot.
 

Folsom

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We're kinda hurling a accusation with out much data. Some of us here work for the companies you're taking a shot at...I want to respect your opinion...just I take it as a bit of a harsh statement at the moment. Respectfully, John

In the late 1990's I could easily surf the internet looking at text and pictures. But a computer that's only a couple years old suddenly struggles with today's texts and pictures? Please... What . a . joke .

I'm very proficient at cleaning out a system to get it to run optimally. Don't worry, I don't play around with systems full of spyware. But my point being is that 90% of what we're looking at texts and pictures, and somehow there's a mild struggle? The only thing that changed was software; the webpages might even be identical. But somehow magically when I load Linux a computer from 3 years ago it can do simple tasks again.

If you're in the industry this should drive you nuts too. You might want to sell new stuff, but let's get real frank, most people haven't needed a speed upgrade for a decade. The advent of HD is the biggest push for the average non-gaming, non-video editing persons.

IF this technology offers anything useful to the average person it'll be a more compact unit with less power and heat constraints. The speed will be negligible to people, and only the form factor and battery life will be an upgrade for them.

Ugh, Erg, UHHHH *pop* a 2 page PDF opens. :p
 

Bobvin

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I think in most commercial software development these days the concept of optimizing code is never considered. Back in the day of expensive RAM, software was optimized. I ran Photoshop v2 on a Mac IIci that had a mere 5mb of RAM (albeit slowly, and often with a lot of virtual ram HD thrashing). Then ram got cheap and software developers left it to the hardware guys to create faster chips. There may be some places where optimizing code still exists, or the rare developer who cares to create highly functional AND elegant code. Just look at the size of a simple app on your smartphone, 20-50mb. Early versions of Photoshop took less.
 

Folsom

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Bobvin, that's exactly my point. I don't expect people to make it at the level they did back during Photoshop v2, because it would impede business way too much. It also runs a little slower going that far back, with no room to speed up. But these days it is a bit sloppy. In my opinion there's no excuse for just layering things on top of kernals and sources in a very lazy fashion. Sell us something new, not just the current text and picture capable machine. Form factor could get a lot more interesting if software wasn't as demanding.
 

Orb

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To be fair one should differentiate between standard PCs and associated software, and enterprise-specialist/virtual machine OS-applications/exascale and their related software.
On the seriously high compute/virtual scaling side efficiency or absolute performance is critical for these not so cheap solutions.

Cheers
Orb
 

Folsom

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I suppose this technology could benefit servers, if it kept cooling down significantly. But they are often running what looks like MSDOS, one of the BSD's.

Super computers? I don't know, their architecture isn't anything like a PC or server's.

And I think you're spot on, their software is very efficient. But again, besides a GUI for setup that has no speed necessity, the actual work is done by stuff that if you can see at all, looks like MSDOS to the typical person.
 

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