Monday, August 01, 2011

Moore's New Law

I have an article up at ECN Magazine about some new innovations in chip design that look to reduce power requirements by a factor of twenty to one hundred for a given level of computing power. There is an example of this chip in production that can do over 90 Billion Instructions Per Second (BIPS) for a power cost of just a little over six tenths of a watt. Compare that to your current desktop or laptop machine.

It was invented by Chuck Moore of FORTH fame.

Details and links can be found at ECN.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

4 comments:

Frank Ch. Eigler said...

It seems more similar to an FPGA than an ordinary processor (tiny on-board memory, narrow inter-node comm channels), so it is incomparable to a laptop.

sykes.1 said...

Moore's Law has been suspended for several years. If it were still in effect, your laptop would be running at 15 to 20 GHz instead of less than 3.

It would be nice if this actually gets implemented by somebody. Intel won't do it unless they own it.

M. Simon said...

fche,

Their target market is cell phones.

sykes,

I was thinking the more general Moore's Law of doubling computing power every eighteen to twenty four months.

M. Simon said...

Also the internode channel is the full width of the processor bus and operates at full processor speed. If the receiving node can take the data fast enough something in the order of a Billion transfers a second is possible.

The developers even contemplate its use for energy harvesting. They have a nice comparison with a TI chip on their site.

As to Intel not using this technology unless they own it: good. It will be Intel's demise.