How Intel Created a Computer Chip That Runs 37% Faster And Uses Half the Energy
From MIT’s Technology Review, hat tip to Big Think, Intel releases a 3-D computer chip:
A transistor’s basic design comprises separate electrodes for incoming and outgoing current, known as the source and drain; material connecting the two, known as the channel; and a third electrode known as the gate, which controls the flow of current. Rather than being a flat layer, the channel of Intel’s reinvented transistors is a long “fin” that protrudes up into the gate electrode above, creating a more intimate electrical connection between the layers. Intel refers to its three-dimensional transistors as having a “tri-gate” design.
Similar designs were first suggested in Japan in the 1980s, and developed for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the 1990s. Intel started investigating the design around 2000, says Bohr, and in 2008 committed to using it. “It’s one thing to make a lab device, but a very different thing to make sure it can produce chips at low cost and high volume,” says Bohr. He says Intel is reusing many existing factory processes, and, as a result, patterning a silicon wafer with Ivy Bridge designs costs only around 2 percent more than it did for Intel’s previous generation of chips.
When does the grown up conversation begin regarding the unknown effects the exponential growth of technological power will have on our economy and culture?
The more apocalyptic prophesies emerge explaining how global debt and national debt will bury us all in the next 10 or 20 years, the more it seems as though a crucial variable is ignored in how humanity might survive the avalanche: the unimaginable wealth that will come from new technological breakthroughs.
Government paved the roads that led to the Intel company parking lot, so really, your article should be re-titled “How Governemnt Created a Computer Chip” etc.
Very good point. Looks like I’m past due for my next trip to the re-education camp so I can remember who really deserves the credit for everything.
Yeah, here’s more “etc.”
Government paved the roads that led to your mother’s vagina, so really, your article should be re-titled “How Governemnt Created a JamesA” etc.
No JamesA, the taxpayers paid formthe roads paved to,the intel parking lot.
The chip was developed in Israel and the US.
http://finance.comcast.net/stocks/news_body.html?ID_NOTATION=269226&ID_NEWS=229977553
The boycott crowd never talks about computers or cell phones. They target stuff like beauty products and couscous which from the looks of most of them they could use more of the former and less of the latter.
Just another example of what the world would be like if only those evil Jews would go away. My guess, is that without them, we would still be using Stone Age technology. Imagine what Europe would be like today, if today they possessed the brainpower of 6 million murdered Jews and their descendents.
7 million of their descendants are a short distance away and are open for business. The euros did not want them so they opened up a place of their own.
Well, yes and no. Yes, because that is exactly what has kept us on the map for the last few decades – or centuries, depending on how you count things.
And yes, because expanding the economy is possible, desireable, precedented, and gives us something better than a zero-sum game. It is the right attitude to have.
Also yes, because I want me some Ivy Bridge, having procrastinated so long on the Sandy Bridge that things have passed me by along with my antique mono-processor workstation.
But also no, because this is exactly what Obambus thinks is going to pull us out of any possible porkulus spending, some deus ex machina he can find by funding Solyndras by the dozen, or importing cheap technicians from India, or teaching more math and science to kiddies, or granting free college tuition to every goldfish in the territory. You can’t innovate on demand. If the stock market is a random walk, how much more technological progress.