3D XPoint

[Admin]

This could be a huge deal.  Possibly the beginning of Storage and Memory merging into one.  Outside of computing, the implications for digital video and photography are pretty staggering.  Cool times.

http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2015/07/28/intel-and-micron-produce-breakthrough-memory-technology

[stoneaxe]

Crazy how it just keeps getting more dense. Where's the end...quark manipulation?

[PonoBill]

some of the burst rates for video are incredible these days. We're going to have point-n-shoots and phone cams capable of performance at the pro level except for the glass.

[eastbound]

i remember being thrilled with having bought a Leading Edge desktop--with dual 5" floppy discs (and of course no hard drive!)

[PonoBill]

I still have my Osborne 1. I actually had a it working a few years ago. The software company I started back in the CPM days ran on a IBM-PC with 128K of memory, and a 40MB hard drive with 28ms access time--blindingly fast, and only $1800! -- for the hard drive. the PC was $2K.

[stoneaxe]

some of the burst rates for video are incredible these days. We're going to have point-n-shoots and phone cams capable of performance at the pro level except for the glass.

I was thinking the same thing. Isn't that the next issue for cams. Seems like there should be something that can be done to better how we gather pixels. The form factor is limiting but we have processing power making huge leaps. When its a 16K or even 256K camera does lens matter with post processing?

[PonoBill]

If you gather up all the photons and phase relationships you don't really need much of a lens--maybe even none at all. You can post-process focus. Already being done at low resolutions.

[eastbound]

in 96, when i started my own shop, we were all sun micro, running unix/solaris OS's. each box and crt cost around 10G.
then windows nt came along, and no more sun micro!

the speed of tech evo (power and cost) of the last 25 years is pretty amazing. not sure if it's a good thing, but certainly not a thing to stand in the way of.

[stoneaxe]

Remember how simple life was when Microsoft Flight Simulator was the benchmark of compatibility?......sigh.

[PonoBill]

At the other end of the wire, Google is building another data center in the Dalles, about twenty miles from here, right up close to the dam as if they were an aluminum smelter. They need a lot of cooling water and a lot of electricity. Who woulda thunk anyone would need data centers that had those kind of cooling and power requirements.

[TallDude]

Lower voltage processors and memory are the future.  I had an an over clocked 4 ghz P4 that was water cooled and a $ 2,500. Quadra card to run my Cad panelization software. I was doing the structural drawings for 6 story mid rise buildings.  I had an 800 watt power supply and 3 additional cooling fans. I had to run an air conditioner in my office  constantly.  They had reached the edge of 5 to 6 volts to drive the pentium to melt down.  Then this group from Israel took the older pentium 3 and reworked it to run as a multi core and most importantly  at around 1.4 volts.
Laptop's were becoming popular and battery life is more important than speed  .... to most people.
This 3D memory architecture is huge. I imagine the processors will improve and adopt some form of the architecture into 3D coprocessing.

[PonoBill]

In most applications lower voltage requires higher current--except in digital stuff. There lower voltage equals lower current and the effect is basically a square function. We're probably headed to microwatt devices with graphene or other carbon room temperature superconductors. It's gonna get weird fast.

[TallDude]

Organic's! Molecular processing. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/102187-scientists-create-brain-like-massively-parallel-computer-from-molecules

[Admin]

It is very cool to think about all of the new architecture possibilities in all of our devices.  Current NAND components (Flash, SSD's) are ~1,500 times slower than DDR (Memory, buffer) and use a "slow" bus.  If this is truly 1000 faster than NAND and durable, that would make it usable (with architecture and OS changes) as RAM or similar and with no power requirement. 

[stoneaxe]

Getting weird fast....I'm starting to think Hawkins, Musk and others might be correct. We need to be REAL careful where this all ends up. So many parallel paths heading to AI that will be able to out do our limited biology. What DOES happen when/if it wakes up?