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Will IBM Turn the Chip Industry On Its Head?
Wall Street Cheat Sheet ^ | October 30, 2012 | Emily Knapp

Posted on 10/30/2012 7:48:08 AM PDT by Straight Vermonter

IBM (NYSE:IBM) is reporting having made a major step forward in its search for a replacement for today’s silicon chips that could change the microchip landscape as we know it. The chip-making technology now being developed will likely ensure the shrinking of the size of the basic digital switch at the center of modern microchips for more than a decade to come.

IBM is using carbon nanotubes as a replacement for silicon as a semiconductor. Carbon nanotubes have the same on-again off-again electrical properties crucial to making chip transistors. IBM announced on Sunday that a team of eight researchers had discovered how to precisely place carbon nanotubes on a computer chip, a development that allows them to arrange the nanotubes 100 times more densely than earlier methods. IBM has built a chip with more than 10,000 carbon nanotube-based elements.

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The technique means the nanotube now has a better chance at becoming the new industry standard once today’s silicon transistor technology grows stale.

Chip makers have routinely doubled the number of transistors that can fit on the surface of a silicon wafer by shrinking the size of the tiny switches that store and route the ones and zeroes that are processed by digital computers in a process known as Moore’s Law, named after Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) co-founder Gordon Moore. In 1965, Moore noted that the industry was doubling the number of transistors it could build on a single chip at routine intervals of 12 to 18 months.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Extended News; News/Current Events; Technical; Testing
KEYWORDS: hitech

1 posted on 10/30/2012 7:48:09 AM PDT by Straight Vermonter
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To: Straight Vermonter

I wish IBM would get a new advertising agency as their ads aren’t funny, don’t make sense, or requires a smarter person than me to understand them.

BTW, what ever happened to the Apple and PC ads, I love them.


2 posted on 10/30/2012 7:55:03 AM PDT by jayrunner
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To: Straight Vermonter

While this is a great step forward, there is a lot of work still required in order to make a viable replacement for the x86 and x86_64 architecture. 10,000 transistors is 1978 density and slightly more than the Motorola 6809 chip

For comparison:
Pentium III 9,500,000 transistors 1999
Pentium 4 42,000,000 transistors 2000
Dual-Core Itanium 2 1,700,000,000 transistors 2006
POWER6 789,000,000 transistors 2007


3 posted on 10/30/2012 8:05:19 AM PDT by taxcontrol
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To: taxcontrol

This is just proof of concept.


4 posted on 10/30/2012 8:22:20 AM PDT by Straight Vermonter (Posting from deep behind the Maple Curtain)
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To: jayrunner

Apple has become a post PC company, their focus is on gadgets.


5 posted on 10/30/2012 8:31:57 AM PDT by dangerdoc (see post #6)
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To: taxcontrol

Yeah, but do they all haveta be ‘ON’ at the same time?........


6 posted on 10/30/2012 8:36:49 AM PDT by Red Badger (Why yes, that was crude and uncalled for......That's why I said it..............)
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To: taxcontrol

It’s not how many, it’s how you use them that counts. There’s way too much bloatware out there now, and for consumer apps, that may be fine and all, but if you really want a uP to stretch its legs, you need your code to be as neat and clock efficient as possible, and RISC uP’s are the way to go.


7 posted on 10/30/2012 8:46:44 AM PDT by factoryrat (We are the producers, the creators. Grow it, mine it, build it.)
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To: jayrunner
I wish IBM would get a new advertising agency as their ads aren’t funny, don’t make sense, or requires a smarter person than me to understand them.

BTW, what ever happened to the Apple and PC ads, I love them.


IBM isn't marketing to you. They are marketing to IT decision makers in medium to large businesses. Not necessarily smarter people, but also including people who want to think of themselves as smarter people.

The Apple/PC ads had run their course.
8 posted on 10/30/2012 9:01:16 AM PDT by Dr. Sivana (There is no salvation in politics.)
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To: Dr. Sivana; jayrunner

...especially considering the fact that IBM sold off its PC and laptop businesses to Lenovo years ago.


9 posted on 10/30/2012 9:11:40 AM PDT by RightOnline (I am Andrew Breitbart!)
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To: taxcontrol

Density is one factor, EMP resilient nano-tube technology is another.


10 posted on 10/30/2012 10:22:36 AM PDT by Puckster
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To: Straight Vermonter

It’s a big improvement over previous techniques, but not anywhere close to commercial production quality.


11 posted on 10/30/2012 10:28:13 AM PDT by Moonman62 (The US has become a government with a country, rather than a country with a government.)
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To: taxcontrol

I just looked at Wiki and according to them GPU’s and FPGA’s in general have higher transistor counts than CPU’s. I wasn’t expecting that.


12 posted on 10/30/2012 10:39:59 AM PDT by Moonman62 (The US has become a government with a country, rather than a country with a government.)
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To: Moonman62

GPU’s have lots of parallelism and on-chip memory, which makes for easy, fluffy gate counts.

FPGA’s either won’t use a large number of the gates on the die (they’ll be blown open during programming or simply ignored), or at best, the way FPGA’s implement a logic circuit can be non-optimal. That’s the trade-off with FPGA’s - you get field programmability (meaning you don’t need to design a custom chip and then get it fab’ed), but you give up optimal design criteria.


13 posted on 10/30/2012 11:43:24 AM PDT by NVDave
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To: Straight Vermonter
If I had a dime for every IBM announcement of “break through”, “game changing”, “quantum leap” developments, I'd be rich. They're always at least 10 years away, but somehow a game changer now.

IBM has many spectacular successes, but it's now more of a service company then an R&D / manufacturing powerhouse.

14 posted on 10/30/2012 12:12:17 PM PDT by uncommonsense (Conservatives believe what they see; Liberals see what they believe.)
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To: uncommonsense
Do you realize that IBM is the market leader in servers and they are increasing this lead? Or that IBM chips run all of the big video game systems? Or that they make nearly all the chips for the world's wireless (cellular) infrastructure? Or that they are starting to dominate in things like chips for set top boxes and TVs? While hardware is a smaller and smaller piece of the IBM pie it is still a really big slice.
15 posted on 10/30/2012 5:47:04 PM PDT by Straight Vermonter (Posting from deep behind the Maple Curtain)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach; ShadowAce; Swordmaker

Thanks Straight Vermonter.


16 posted on 10/31/2012 3:23:28 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: rdb3; Calvinist_Dark_Lord; Salo; JosephW; Only1choice____Freedom; amigatec; stylin_geek; ...

17 posted on 10/31/2012 4:38:24 AM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: Straight Vermonter
"Do you realize that IBM is the market leader in servers and they are increasing this lead?"

You can check my profile - I know IBM very well.

I’ve played a prominent role in high tech for 30 years, cutting my teeth at Texas Instruments in their Bipolar Logic, designing their 1st distributed computing platforms across IBM mainframes, minis, and PCs (TI PCs of course). IBM was one of our largest customers and TI was one of their largest. In fact, they sent their engineers to TI for training on their OS and databases.

Also, I've worked with IBM's Global Services on different occasions when companies I worked for outsourced to GS - two "big brother" companies who owned several of the largest data platforms in the world (VP of products for one and chief global architect for the other).

18 posted on 10/31/2012 10:42:32 AM PDT by uncommonsense (Conservatives believe what they see; Liberals see what they believe.)
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To: SunkenCiv

Thanks for the ping.


19 posted on 11/01/2012 11:25:39 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach ((The Global Warming Hoax was a Criminal Act....where is Al Gore?))
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