Magazine cover from 2000, 1ghz amazing!

Talonsbane

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I actually bought this magazine back then & think about it every time somebody says anything about how AMD will never fully match Intel. It has given me plenty of hope that this competition is heating up again to push technology boundaries & keep prices lower.
 

Montoya

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i thought we would be working more on 128 bit computing by now, over the 5 ghz that processors can hit now.
Isnt 7nm pretty much hitting the limit of what silicon can do?

Electrons are jumping around at this point.

edit: Samsung has 5nm production, but estimates are transistors stop getting smaller by 2021
 
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Talonsbane

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Bambooza

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Isnt 7nm pretty much hitting the limit of what silicon can do?

Electrons are jumping around at this point.

edit: Samsung has 5nm production, but estimates are transistors stop getting smaller by 2021

It will be interesting to see what the threshold for clock speed is. I know that back in 2004 we were at the 4 Ghz mark and then they went dual cores to deal with the heat build up/ power consumption. The other thing that is interesting is that a clock cycle can be faster than the electrical signal's ability to cross the motherboard. (current world record with a production cpu is 8.7 Ghz https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cpu_frequency/rankings#start=0#interval=20 )
 

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Isnt 7nm pretty much hitting the limit of what silicon can do?

Electrons are jumping around at this point.

edit: Samsung has 5nm production, but estimates are transistors stop getting smaller by 2021
I don't normally comment on or describe this kind of stuff, it becomes a kind of messy thing really quickly because of the amount of speculation and misdirection in marketing. And marketing is something these companies have in spades. I do think they will get to 3nm, but it will be marketing that gets there first, and they will get there in 2021. Come hell or high water. We call it marketing jiz (or jizz), by the way. Just so you know.
 

Talonsbane

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I remember when you use to have to use a pair of 5" floppy disks with 1 running the OS & the other whatever program that you wanted to use. Which often required switching the 2nd disk to perform extended functions.
 

NaffNaffBobFace

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I remember in the year 2000 talking to a buddy of mine who was in to building home computers. He showed me his latest and i was like "Cool" and he said about Moores Law and the limitation of Silicon and that something new will have to be found at some point.

"Why don't you just put two processors in then?" said I knowing nothing.
"Uh... well you'd have to rewrite how software works." he said.
"Well once you've hit the limit how else are you going to get faster? Many hands make light work if one chip can do it in 1 minute two chips should be able to do it in 30 seconds." I countered, still knowing nothing.

He pondered it for a few seconds then put a Dr Dray song on which was ridiculously lewd.

Now we have 4, 6, 8, 12, 16 cores but as far as I can tell software still isn't really being written to take advantage of all that spare processing power.

Lost contact with that friend years ago, I wonder what he's doing now?
 

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I remember when you use to have to use a pair of 5" floppy disks with 1 running the OS & the other whatever program that you wanted to use. Which often required switching the 2nd disk to perform extended functions.
Yep. And 8" single sided floppy disks before that. 120Kb ftw. I remember going to a hospital to help configure a system, and they had the boot disk stuck to the side of the computer with a magnet, for "safe keeping close to the computer"... Seriously.
 

Talonsbane

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Yep. And 8" single sided floppy disks before that. 120Kb ftw. I remember going to a hospital to help configure a system, and they had the boot disk stuck to the side of the computer with a magnet, for "safe keeping close to the computer"... Seriously.
They did what? *epic cringe* I'm guessing that they periodically needed new disks programmed for them.
 

Vavrik

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They did what? *epic cringe* I'm guessing that they periodically needed new disks programmed for them.
There were a lot of funny things happening back then. We had the IBM PC, and the Apple LISA ... the Mac didn't come out until Superbowl Sunday in '84. (Apple also apologized for the LISA) "They'd never be more than toys, mini-computers are where it's at." That's the thinking. Inside of 2 years, all that was history. IT departments all over the globe have been trying to find a way to return to the Mini-Computer ever since.
 
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