Measuring and Sustaining the New Economy Report of a Workshop (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Microprocessors and Computers: Five Trends
Microprocessors and Computers: Five Trends
Pages 74-81
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From page 74... ...
Mowery added that the vertically specialized firms that are entering the semiconductor industry are focusing largely on development work at the commercial, leading edge of technology. He questioned whether this sort of highly focused, upstream research could be maintained without better integration with more basic research.
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From page 75... ...
Nonetheless, materials science has provided many such effects, such as introducing copper to interconnect the substrates of the chip; dielectrics that improve performance through the wires; and silicon on insulator that improves the circuitry within it. Silicon germanium is an alternative technology that does not replace CMOS but it does allow you to build mixed-signal processors at very high frequencies that can handle digital and analog circuitry together.
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From page 76... ...
He could not say whether it would continue as an exponential curve or something less, but he expressed confidence in continued price performance. He stressed that from a systems perspective, processor performance alone "is not the whole game." IBM estimates that of the compound growth rate in systems performance, about 20 percent has been due to traditional
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From page 77... ...
Continuing Progress in Supercomputers He then discussed growth in the speed of supercomputers, which are inherently parallel machines, and offered a forecast of an 84 percent compounded growth rate in terms of teraflops, or trillion floating point operations per second. This rate would be even higher if one began with the Deep Blue chess-playing machine; great speed is possible in special-purpose machines.
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From page 78... ...
Pervasive devices will become the dominant means of information access. The personal computer will continue to drive a healthy business but it will be dwarfed by the growth of data-capable cell phones, which will pass the installed personal computer base in 2002, and the additional growth of personal digital assistants (PDAs)
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From page 79... ...
Individuals writing lines of code have made good progress but not at the exponential rates of lithography, for example. Such deployments are the next step beyond the packages mentioned earlier, where software for electronic utilities has an economy of scale.
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From page 80... ...
The Electronic Business of the Future The fifth trend is that the electronic business of the future is going to be dynamic, adaptive, continually optimized, and dependent on powerful business analytics and knowledge management. Those who started using information technology in businesses years ago saw it largely as a tool for automation doing manual tasks faster and cheaper.
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From page 81... ...
The number of new drugs being produced by deep computing, however, is beginning to rise, and this number is estimated to triple by the year 2010. These deep computing processes include rational drug design, genomic data usage, personalized medicine, protein engineering, and molecular assemblies.
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