Did anyone read the recent New Scientist article on Chaogates? They are a gate (NAND, NOR etc) that can be reprogrammed on the fly to change their characteristics. ie for one cycle it is a NOR a few nanoseconds later it is a NAND.
There is an overhead in controlling them, but they expect an order of magnitude reduction in transistor count in chips. Also aiming to use them in memory.
Not only can they change to speed processing, but they could make chips self-healing.
Read more here (and no, I don't pretend to understand all of it!) Quote:
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Ditto and his colleagues are stripping down their chaotic circuits to see just how few transistors they can get away with. They calculate that they can reduce the 750 million transistors used in one of the latest graphics processor chips by an order of magnitude. "We might get away with 75 million transistors," he says. This is not just an matter of saving space. Powerful graphics chips consume a large amount of power and throw out heat that has to be removed. Chaogates could reduce power consumption and perhaps eliminate the need for fans to keep these chips from overheating.
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30 years from now?
18-11-2008, 10:07 AM
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