Intel Patents Cosmic Ray Detector, No Really
" Their patent suggests built-in cosmic ray detectors may be the best
option. The detector would either spot cosmic ray hits on nearby circuits, or directly on the detector itself. When triggered, it could activate error-checking circuits that refresh the nearby memory, repeat the most recent actions, or ask for the last message from outside circuits to be sent again."And yes, that's a cosmic ray analyzer in the top corner thumbnail shot. Intel's full patent, found here and awarded in December 07, is expected to manifest itself in a slightly smaller form factor however.
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Huh? This is all greek to me... interesting as it may be. |
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Well I understand some of it. I am guesing according to the article the smaller the silicon gets every year or so the more it can be effected by our atmosphere. Switching transisters from off to on or on to off creating errors, this chip in a sense will attempt to detect such errors and provide a form of Error correction/checking.
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Precisely Brian... Cosmic rays, like stray protons from space, hit the earth's atmosphere and can wreak havoc inside of computer chips. The smaller the chip geometry, the higher the chance it will affect a larger area of the chip, like the cache structure for example. It's sort of like on-board hard drive corruption but without the hard drive. If a chip's memory or cache gets corrupted, obviously you're computing with bad data. Not good... Intel and other manufacturers like AMD, NVIDIA etc, compensate for this currently by enabling their chips with end to end CRC checking, and other error detection/correction methods inside their memory structures but eventually, as chip designs continue to shrink, it's going to get harder to catch and manage those errors on the fly. I assume that's where a device like a cosmic ray detector comes in handy... |
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I wonder if this means companys may have already been on the verge or reaching the point of deminishing returns? Usually companys only design stuff like this when it's already an issue. |
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When these become mainstream it will be fun to watch peoples expression when you tell them yeh my computer has a cosmic ray detector, its pretty leet. |
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i thought some bios had something like soft error detection or something in them to prevent this |
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You mean covering it with tin foil isn't going to stop the cosmic rays from interfering with my comuting experience. Darn wasted a box of foil. |
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My grandma used to wear a tinfoil hat to block out evil rays. Since tinfoil didn't work for methious these must be rays of a different variety. |
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always worked for me |
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