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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."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxim on Tuesday March 11 2014, @04:42PM
While I agree with you, this will not help with CPU heavy calculations.
Plenty of scientific and otherwise CS related tasks don't really use any OS/libary services, but rather concentrate around tightly looped algorithms which just need enormous processing power. Think ray-tracing for instance, or physic simulations, or optimization problems, etc etc etc.
So I would say that you are both right and wrong in same time. You are right that if we started to care about performance instead of bragging about 'How I implemented this in javascript' it would boost the performance by lot for
most of everyday task we do.
But for CPU heavy algorithmic tasks, only increases in CPU power could help making it faster.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 11 2014, @05:01PM
Simple solution: a logic block needs to be added to the CPU to detect if the OS is running the Win32 API or other select bits of highly-ubiquitous crap code, and if that's detected, reduce the CPU clock to 1% of its maximum speed.
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Tuesday March 11 2014, @05:08PM
"So I would say that you are both right and wrong in same time."
Sounds like a quantum computing problem. Better call dwave.
(Score: 2, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday March 12 2014, @04:58AM
Dwave's not here, man.
(Score: 4, Informative) by wjwlsn on Tuesday March 11 2014, @06:05PM
Exactly... a physicist proposing this is probably not concerned with speeding up shitty consumer software and web services. He's more likely looking for significant improvements in the speed of scientific/numerical algorithms. With much higher speeds, we could stop using algorithms based on simplifying assumptions, and/or we could greatly improve the time/space/energy resolution of the algorithms we already have (e.g., shorter time steps, smaller grid meshes, bigger solution domains).
I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.