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Physicist Proposes a New Type of Computing

posted by janrinok on Tuesday March 11 2014, @04:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the well-its-worth-a-try dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"Physicist proposes a new type of computing at SXSW (South-by-SouthWest Interactive), known as orbital computing. From the article:

A physicist from SLAC who spoke at SXSW interactive has proposed using the state changes in the orbits of electrons as a way to build faster computers. The demand for computing power is constantly rising, but we're heading to the edge of the cliff in terms of increasing performance - both in terms of the physics of cramming more transistors on a chip and in terms of the power consumption. We've covered plenty of different ways that researchers are trying to continue advancing Moore's Law - this idea that the number of transistors (and thus the performance) on a chip doubles every 18 months - especially the far out there efforts that take traditional computer science and electronics and dump them in favor of using magnetic spin, quantum states or probabilistic logic.

A new impossible that might become possible thanks to Joshua Turner, a physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, who has proposed using the orbits of electrons around the nucleus of an atom as a new means to generate the binary states (the charge or lack of a charge that transistors use today to generate zeros and ones) we use in computing."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by oodaloop on Tuesday March 11 2014, @04:33PM

    by oodaloop (1982) <jkaminoffNO@SPAMzoho.com> on Tuesday March 11 2014, @04:33PM (#14828)

    Yeah, all those physicists should stop their research and become software developers. Or, you know, maybe we as a society could do both.

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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 11 2014, @04:54PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday March 11 2014, @04:54PM (#14848)

    They could work on something more useful, like better battery technology or artificial gravity.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Boxzy on Tuesday March 11 2014, @05:21PM

    by Boxzy (742) on Tuesday March 11 2014, @05:21PM (#14876)

    But that's Grishnakh's point, while we allow bad programming to be an option there WILL be no improvements.

    I cut my teeth on assembly, I dread to think what the result would be with 21st century programmers forced to optimize, even with todays environments.

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