Handheld Supercomputers in 10-15 Years? 240
An anonymous reader writes "Supercomputers small enough to fit into the palm of your hand are only 10 or 15 years away, according to Professor Michael Zaiser, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Engineering and Electronics.
Zaiser has been researching how tiny nanowires — 1000 times thinner than a human hair — behave when manipulated. Apparently such minuscule wires behave differently under pressure, so it has up until now been impossible to arrange them in tiny microprocessors in a production environment. Zaiser says he's figured out how to make them behave uniformly.
These "tamed" nanowires could go inside microprocessors that could, in turn, go inside PCs, laptops, mobile phones or even supercomputers. And the smaller the wires, the smaller the chip can be.
"If things continue to go the way they have been in the past few decades, then it's 10 years... The human brain is very good at working on microprocessor problems, so I think we are close — 10 years, maybe 15," Zaiser said."
Why supercomputers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't a super-computer a relative term? I mean, I don't know the exact figure but I would that my Dual Core Intel box at home is probably a good deal faster than a super-computer from the 80s. It is probably hundreds of thousands or perhpas millions of times more powerful than the computers used in the Apollo programme. Surely the measure of what is a super-computer and what isn't must be based upon what the fastest machines are in the world at that time.
Perhaps what he means is that what we currently do with supercomputers today will be able to be done with low cost computing. I can certainly see that being true. In fifteen years, it may be possible to adequately simulate nuclear weapons tests, climate models, or protein folding from a run-of-the-mill desktop.
However, the improvements in computing speed will also apply to super-computers. With that extra power you can run more refined models so I can't see how this could obsolete the traditional bulky super-computer.
In short, I can't really understand the super-computer slant of the article. Why not just talk about general-purpose computing instead?
Simon
Already here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why supercomputers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista slowness -- seriously (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can put a supercomputer in your hand, it's not a supercomputer. A week ago, we had an article here on a guy who'd wired several PS3s together and called it a supercomputer. Folks didn't agree with the supercomputer designation, even though he was getting flops that would clearly have been supercomputer speed just five or six years ago. It's not speed that defines a supercomputer, it's speed relative to what's commonly available.
If we crunch down machines to incredibly small size, then research institutions will buy one 50 times that size. Every time. What will happen is that that tech (if it's not expensive) will drive PC speeds up, perhaps phenomenally, software development tools will make use of the extra speed to make programming easier at the expense of run-time, and we won't see significant speed increases in the user experience. The user will be able to do more, of course, but he'll be complaining "When I speak into the microphone to tell it to write a three page synopsis of this book in it's library, it stalls and lags, and sometimes I tell it twice, before I get a response, and then it gives me two outputs. This thing is SLOW."
Am I missing something? (Score:5, Insightful)
The analogy I've seen comparing big iron midrange and mainframes vs. PC's is "Yeah, the PC is zippy, but it's like a ninja bike. The big iron is like a dump truck. The midrange isn't going to get up to speed as quickly but it's going to be doing a hell of a lot more for the effort."
Re:Why supercomputers? (Score:3, Insightful)
When people don't have news, they make up them. They go and interview anyone who then pulls numbers out of his ass, and thus the "storage technology of the week", "power source of the week", "processing power prediction of the week", etc. is born.
These articles should be considered spam.
Re:Yes, it will run linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Throwing things on the floor go much faster than 9.8 m/s^2.
With respect to the story at hand. We already have handheld supercomputers.
The Cray 1 was about 100 MFLOPS. Most all cell phones and PDAs CPUs can outperform that.
I work with "supercomputers", and all I see them as are new, expensive, unreliable, and energy inefficient versions of laptops and things.
In the same spirit, some people in the biz call these things time machines. They are just previews of things to come.
Re:Yes, it will run linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Throwing things on the floor go much faster than 9.8 m/s^2.
Re:Yes, it will run linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Did someone make you say this to stop a terrorist attack? Bruce Willis had to do the same thing in Die Hard 3 by standing in a black neighborhood with a racist sign round his neck...