New Alternatives To Silicon May Increase Chip Speeds By Orders of Magnitude. 139
First time accepted submitter Consistent1 writes "A paywalled article in the "Nature Materials" journal describes the use of Magnetite to achieve ultra fast electronic switching, albeit, at the moment, only at extremely low temperatures. According to a story on Quartz, the team, led by Dr. Hermann Dürr from the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences hopes 'to continue the experiment with materials that can operate at room temperature. One possibility is vanadium dioxide.' Chips utilizing this technology may operate at clock cycles thousands of times faster than the silicon-based chips used today."
Re:Overclock (Score:5, Funny)
With a normal operating temperature of -190C, you'd probably need an extra fan or something to overclock it.
Not Obvious (Score:2, Funny)
I strongly suspect that people are already suffering from future shock but have not put a finger on what is going on. Technology is a huge cause of job and social displacement at this time. It is not just the economy that is causing such chaos but the fact that less people can do a lot more work due to technology. Very fast and very smart computers will accelerate this pending upheaval. I am all for it but we need to be paying attention and doing triage on the wounded and displaced and even learn to identify changes that we do not tend to see clearly. One example is the tendency of youth to take wild risks lately. It is as if their future is hopeless therefore they feel they might as well destroy themselves. Radical stunts on skateboards are an example. For teens to seriously damage themselves over and over again and think that it is funny when they really do permanent injury to themselves is shocking. It even extends to risky drug use and teen suicides as well. They can not sum it up but in essence feel that they are worthless as they see no reasonable place in society for them in the future due to technology-computers-robotics making human labor less and less important. This has gone so fat that even education is questionable as a negative expense in that usually more education will not be enough to change anything in the lives of teens or young adults. We absolutely must get social policy to advance as quickly as technology. We really are not very far from replacing humans for truck and service driving. There go millions of jobs. We also are on the edge of fast food joints that no longer need humans in the cooking areas.