Items tagged with transistors
We tend to take for granted that our PCs will turn on and the silicon inside them will dutifully crunch through whatever tasks we ask, be it video encoding, playing games, or even just watching a YouTube video. The underlying technology has come a long way to make all this possible, and crucially it has taken decades...
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Moore's Law, as revised in 1975, states the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit will double around every two years. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, and it's driven processor design for several decades. But what happens when Moore's Law is no...
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It's a pretty remarkable thing that, for the most part, Moore's Law has been accurate for over 50 years, helping to set the pace for processor design for several decades. However, Moore's Law is in serious trouble of being broken if, as a group of researchers predict, transistors stop shrinking within the next five...
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On the consumer side, we're accustomed to chip makers introducing increasingly smaller and faster processors, as has been the case over the past several decades. But like trying to fold a piece of paper in half over and over again, there comes a point where going smaller may require new methods. The semiconductor...
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Three atoms thick. According to a paper published this week in the science journal Nature by a group of researchers from Cornell University, that is the breadth of the transistors that can now be produced using an experimental — and highly conductive — material called transition metal dichalcogenide (also called a...
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The transistor is one of the most profound innovations in all of human existence. First discovered in 1947, it has scaled like no advance in human history; we can pack billions of transistors into complicated processors smaller than your thumbnail. After decades of innovation, however, the transistor has faltered. Clock speeds stalled in 2005...
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The answer of course is Intel's upcoming Itanium brand CPU codenamed Tukwila.While we tend to focus a lot of our attention on the desktop market, we cannot help but be impressed by server CPUs when we hear figures like 2 billion transistors or 30 MB of on-die cache that make up a good portion of those transistors. “The new Itanium processor...
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