It had to happen

[robinturner]

Well I'm definitely not going bother with 64-bit processors now - an Israeli compnay has apparently produced a protoype of an optical processor and a Japanese research team have built a controlled quantum gate. Assuming this isn't another cold fusion brouhaha, silicon could be as obsolete as valves before too long.

Comments

[circumambulate.livejournal.com]

nope. All your big players will be in silicon for at least the next odd decade, if not several, simply because of the billions of dollars that have been invested in silicon manufacturing technology. There are lots of things that already exist that are faster than a nickle/silicon die, but it would cost billions to switch over the current manufacturing capability, assuming you could even mass produce them in sufficient quantities.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, one of the comments on the optical computing venture was "Yes, but will they be able to mass-produce them cheaply enough." So you're right, inertia will take it's toll. We can expect to see more use of optics in communication between devices (an optical bus sounds reasonable to my non-expert mind) but by the time we get optical CPUs, they might well be obsolete already. Quantum computing is still a way off, but the difference is that if and when they get a workable, affordable product, it will wipe everything out - if the silicon-based life forms don't move over to it, they'll just become extinct.

There again, I remember when I used to think that we'd have flying cars in the year 2000, and we'd all be wearing shiny silver jumpsuits.

[b0rg.livejournal.com]

solri (I'm sorry, I don't know your name :) mine is Peter), but seriously I can't wait till you finally get yourself to buy a computer and stop philosophising the idea of buying one. Seriously, there is no point of talking about the lack of application for just made 64bit processor - it's the future around the corner - deal with it. Would you find the discussion about 64bit pencils vs 32 bit pencils engaging? Will you? Both of them do the job of writing letters on the piece of paper. Reminds me of a ancient joke about NASA advertising the grant for the device that write on orbit (no gravity) for the big sum of money. At the same time russians just use pencils...

The interesting thing is: in my company we have a P3 Xeon server (nothing fancy 1G P3, raid and all that expensive shite). Well it broke recently (solar storm is as good reason as any). But now we have a difficult task explaining to non-computer management why the 2x500E computers are better than 5000 one, bought 2 years ago. (I prefer clasters of cheap machines to one big expensive server). That's practical phisophy :-)

[solri.livejournal.com]

These days I wouldn't find a discussion about pencils engaging, although my mother would, as she is really into stationery (and in the past I have had discussions about the relative merits of pencils and charcoal - I used to hate drawing with charcoal at school, but became a convert in my twenties).

To answer your question, I will finally get myself to buy a computer when I finish sorting through my shortlist of potential suppliers, been to visit one or two of them, drank a lot of tea, talked about the weather, football and politics, and done a lot of haggling. Buying things can take a long time in Turkey. When it finally happens, you will be spared posts about what I'm going to buy, and get a lot of boring posts about device drivers. Maybe I can philosophise about device drivers too.