socialmedian: The coolest and scariest things coming in the chip industry’s future

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The coolest and scariest things coming in the chip industry’s future

Source: VentureBeat

Aug 26, 2009

Summary

At the Hot Chips chip design conference at Stanford University, chip researchers spelled out some of the toughest computing problems of the future and the solutions to deal with them. Hearing these pioneers and visionaries talk was both inspiring and disturbing. They talked alternately about running into technological brick walls, and about ways to get around them. But they warned that the ever-increasing cost of making the newest chips will have an impact on the entire food chain of electronic products where chips are used. Here’s a roundup of the ideas that bounced around the walls of the Memorial Auditorium at Stanford University this week.

COOL 1. Universal Translator — Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of graphics chip maker Nvidia, predicted in a keynote speech that graphics chips will be used to compute non-graphics tasks. That’s good because graphics chips (working in concert with microprocessors) are expected to speed up more than 570 times in the next six years, while microprocessors are expected to advance only about three-fold in performance. Among t