Transistors down to 5 Nm now, IBM!:

https://phys.org/news/2017-06-alliance-transistor-5nm-technology.html

30 billion on a chip now. 7 Nm in production, 5 Nm next year or so.

why is this important? it's , like, very small already

Originally posted by sonhouse
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-alliance-transistor-5nm-technology.html

30 billion on a chip now. 7 Nm in production, 5 Nm next year or so.

7 nm doesn't tell me much.

What do we have now? Like 10 nm?
What do I have in my laptop?

Originally posted by FabianFnas
7 nm doesn't tell me much.

What do we have now? Like 10 nm?
What do I have in my laptop?

I think laps use generally 15 nm size transistors, giving several billion on a chip. go to 5 nm and you get something like 8 times as many, it makes for more complex CPU/graphics and so forth or for the same number of devices, less power so more battery life.

You could for instance, put 8 or so CPU's in one chip or more.

Now you can get 4 but that could increase a whole lot when they produce 5 nm chips. That is a transistor built with 50 ANGSTROM parts! Considering one silicon atom takes up about 3 angstroms, you are now starting to count individual atoms making up transistors. After that, to keep Moore's law going you would have to get sneaky and start to build UP, several layers of transistors with vertical connections but that is a decade down the line before we need that level of complexity. But it means much more powerful computers, say a trillion comps per second whereas now they do a few billion or so.
It would rewrite the home computer book. A trillion comps per second is now in the supercomputer realm. Of course the big guys are approaching EXAbit computing now, 1000 trillion per second.Not there yet but with these new 5 nm chips coming out in a couple years, Exa bit computers won't be far behind.

these chips are now small enough to implant in human brains. You could fit all chess openings on a chip, yes, and evn endgame tablebases !! Then you could even beat Ivanchuk in Blitz !!

Originally posted by sonhouse
I think laps use generally 15 nm size transistors, giving several billion on a chip. go to 5 nm and you get something like 8 times as many, it makes for more complex CPU/graphics and so forth or for the same number of devices, less power so more battery life.

You could for instance, put 8 or so CPU's in one chip or more.

Now you can get 4 but that co ...[text shortened]... t with these new 5 nm chips coming out in a couple years, Exa bit computers won't be far behind.

I remember my first computer of my own. It was built around the Zilog Z80 processor, operated in 2 MHz, had one Kb of OS.
It couldn't hold an assembler in memory so I had to program the thing in machine code hexadecimally. Learnt a lot. Those were the days!

Originally posted by FabianFnas
I remember my first computer of my own. It was built around the Zilog Z80 processor, operated in 2 MHz, had one Kb of OS.
It couldn't hold an assembler in memory so I had to program the thing in machine code hexadecimally. Learnt a lot. Those were the days!

What was it, a ZX81?

I think, and it is easy for me to be mistaken about this, that the channel width limits the frequency the processor can run at, so as well as increasing the number of transistors that can fit on a die they can make its clock run faster as well.

Originally posted by DeepThought
What was it, a ZX81?

I think, and it is easy for me to be mistaken about this, that the channel width limits the frequency the processor can run at, so as well as increasing the number of transistors that can fit on a die they can make its clock run faster as well.

It was a Nascom-2, bought as a do-it-yourself construction kit. Soldered for a week, and it was quite a feeling when I put in the plug - and it failed. However, I found the error and corrected it. Then it worked fine with a staggering speed!

Originally posted by FabianFnas
It was a Nascom-2, bought as a do-it-yourself construction kit. Soldered for a week, and it was quite a feeling when I put in the plug - and it failed. However, I found the error and corrected it. Then it worked fine with a staggering speed!

Well, we were given a REAL gem. A genuine IBM computer, a FOUR megahertz 8080 WITH co-processor. A real screamer! Funny, I remember, it belonged to a friend, a college prof, and he got something better (how could you get better than THAT🙂

I remember he still had a spreadsheet with grades on it.

I scrolled down and like we see to day, scroll down and it goes down quickly.

Not so on THAT box. It fiddly farted around and the first couple lines of the SS moved a bit and then a blank line appeared and then the next line above jumped into the blank space. THAT was scroll. If you wanted to get down to the bottom of a long SS list, be prepared to wait about a half hour🙂

Now we have what, ten thousand times the power in just our cell phones? Times have changed, eh.

My first comp was a TI-99 with I think 16K of ram. So I started a project of hand wiring a 64 K memory board, got the proper connectors, chips, wire and such and started hand wiring the thing together.

I got about half finished when I saw an ad come out in some electronics rag. Now available, the one MEGABIT memory chip. Ah shyte! I threw my half finished board across the room in disgust. My board was obsolete before it was even finished🙂

One megabit chip= 128 Kilobytes of memory! Quite something for back in the day!

16 bit chips couldn't even address that much, limited to 64 K unless you did some tricks.
24 bit chips could only do about a megabyte or so.
32 bit chips can only access 4 gigabytes and now we see 16+ gig ram so we have to go to 64 bit chips and they can access about 18 TRILLION bytes so I don't think we will need much more than that!