Posts Tagged: ‘microprocessors’

The news is out — Intel has developed a three-dimensional approach to transistor design for microprocessors. This is an important step in microarchitecture design. Moore’s Law predicts that the number of transistors manufacturers can cram onto a one-inch silicon wafer doubles every 24 months or so. But that’s a finite amount of space and we may very well be reaching the smallest sizes possible for transistors without revolutionizing the entire classic computer model.

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This week Nvidia announced its latest Tegra processor for Tablet computers and smartphones. The chip has 4 cores, which appears to be a first in this class of CPUs. This gives it unprecedented power, as demonstrated in this video: Here is what it means in real terms – the ability to drive 1440p displays: “We [...]

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The following video takes us back to Fairchild Semiconductors in 1967, as the age of integrated circuits is getting underway. It is talking about integrated circuits that contain 20 components (transistors, resistors, etc.), and therefore are far simpler than the billion-transistor chips we see today. It is also an era when the masks used to [...]

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Back in the early 1980s, the 6502 microprocessor dominated the microprocessor landscape. The 6502 powered everything from the Apple II to the Nintendo NES. It contained just a few thousand transistors (compared to microprocessors today that exceed a billion transistors), but at the time it was quite powerful. Fast forward to today, and there are [...]

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Here is an outstanding video that explains how the world’s first transistor works, as well as all subsequent transistors. This invention made possible everything from portable radios to the microprocessors that power modern society: Far more detail on transistors can be found in this lecture: This video demonstrates how transistors are created on chips: For [...]

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IBM has announced a mainframe that can act like 100,000 virtual machines, each acting as a web server, database engine, even a Windows machine, or whatever you need to build out the data center for a major corporation. It does that using the fastest chips available…

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Hey there! This week was an eventful one for me and Chris at HowStuffWorks.com. On top of the podcasting, blogging, social networking and article writing, Chris and I tested a new project: TechStuff Live! Starting next Tuesday, we will be streaming a live show at 1:00 p.m. Eastern once a week. The show will cover tech news, sites and products that have landed on our radar and a few other fun segments. Plus it’s video! You’ll be able to watch as I say things that inspire Chris to hide behind his computer. We’ll have more details about the show on Monday, so stay tuned.

The episodes this week were inspired by listeners. On Monday, our goal was to demystify the terms megabits, megabytes and megahertz. Of course, we didn’t just focus on the mega range — we also talked about everything from kilobytes to yottabytes. But if you’ve ever wondered how many bytes are in a kilobyte (hint: it’s not 1,000), you should listen to this show. We also explain how you can calculate how long it will take you to download a file assuming your Internet connection is as fast as advertised.

On Wednesday, we talk about the current video game consoles on the market. Chris and I first did an episode about video game consoles more than a year ago. But that show was only five minutes long and didn’t have much detail. This time we give the subject a bit more time and explain why we don’t cover video game news as often as some listeners would like. We recorded the show the day that Sony announced price cuts in the PS3 but before Microsoft announced the cuts to the Xbox 360. With the cheaper 360, I think I may have found my next game console.

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R. Colin Johnson at EE Times wrote that Moore’s Law is once again being predicted at the end of its life — but this time, the word is coming from an IBM Fellow named Carl Anderson.

Anderson, who’s involved Big Blue’s server products, spoke at the International Symposium on Physical Design 2009 conference, and said just like the railroad, car and aircraft industries, the computer chip industry will see an end to its exponential growth. Multicore processors may carry on for a while, but designers are starting to realize that they don’t need super-high-end processors in their machines, especially with the cost of research and design into the latest microprocessor chips.

Moore’s Law isn’t really a law at all. It’s an observation made and published by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore. He noticed that the transistors on microprocessors halved in size every 18 months (or so) and speed doubled. He’s revised the timeframe to about every two years, but microprocessor manufacturers have turned his observation into a self-fulfilling prophecy, pushing newer, faster chips out the door at pretty regular intervals.

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When the global economy began to falter, the Tech sector seemed untouchable. A few months later, the Tech industry began to see the effects from the downturn. Even companies like Microsoft and Google began to lay off employees. But could the economic downturn provide the foundation for cloud computing?

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