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What's the Fastest Speed that a CPU can ever reach without breaking the Laws of Physics? / With Moore's Law increases in CPU Speeds, you would think computers becoming infinitely fast, but NO CAN DO!
At the rate computers continue to accelerate like in the past, we'll max out in less than a century.
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Something I am good at answering: Everything in the world is limited by the speed of light. in many cases electricity is assumed to be going that fast, however I believe it goes a little slower, and it vary depending on other things. Light moves at 3x10^8 meters/sec. we now have processors that are 32 nm (32x10^-9 m) between each component. That means the time it takes to get from one component to the next (minimum) is 1.07x10^-16 sec or .106 femto sec keep in mind for one instruction the processor has to go through 1000s of these components (ball park estimate) so it will take about 106 femto sec per instruction (once again ballpark) Another thing you have to take into account is prorogation delay. Prorogation delay is the time it takes for a signal to arrive on one side of a component to the other, if you have a bunch of components in series you add up the times of each component. This is by far the longest time waist of the computer. In addition, I do not have any ballpark estimates on the time delay. The distance between each component on the chip is unlikely to get much smaller. In quantum theory there is apart that talks about "finite potential wells." a brief, and I mean brief expiation is that an electron can exist outside of where you would think it would. Imagine an open top box and there is a ball in there. Now like an electron it is impossible to know the balls exact position at any given time. So the best we can do is find the probability of the ball being in a certain location; however, the "probability function" says the ball has a small, but still relatively possible chance of it existing outside the box, and if it is too close to the next component or wire it can jump over causing errors. In addition, we get to talk about Moore's law, which says every 18 months you will double the number of transistors on a chip, well that is breaking down now. We are starting to reach the limit of how many transistors we can fit on a chip. When you think about it, you cannot keep dividing anything in this universe by twos, when you come down to a single atom you cannot break it down to much more. (Yes, you can but for our purposes, it is useless) transistors need a set number of atoms to work. OK as a summary: we are limited by the speed of light and the distance between each component. The closer the compounds are can cause an electron to cross to a different part of the circuit causing issues. Propagation delay also drastically limits the speed of a processor... Conclusion: speeds are not going to get much faster with the current technology. In addition, as far as quantum computing, I am not holding my breath... Excellent Answer! Would you mind translating that down to layman's term in Ghz, Thz, etc. http://lockergnome.net/questions/13843/when-will-we-see-thz?page=1#59906 1
well frequency is defined as 1 over the period, a period is the time it takes to complete one clock cycle. so neglecting prorogation delay. which is a huge part of the time it takes, and it honestly is not very realistic to neglect it turns out that if you have a period of 106 femto sec is 9 THz. however with propagation delay you will find that as far as clock speed it is right about where we are at now, which is why companies have not made processors much faster(clock speed), but add more cores. WOW! 9 THz would be awesome!! I've only heard of 10 GHz, but haven't seen any?!? You're wrong. Part of the technology involved with transistor count and nm tech is making those components work with fewer atoms and less space between the transistors. Therefore, we could eventually have zeptometer technology. Just maybe. 1
Zeno's The dichotomy paradox
Suppose Homer wants to catch a stationary bus. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a fourth, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on. HHBones - yes but you cannot split the atom and still have it work the same way as with the whole atom, a transistor has 2 different materials and are layered PNP NPN. without getting into specifics P is one type of material (impurities added to silicon), and N is another type (different impurities added) the order describes the layering of them. now today they are going away from silicon for high end chips because of some of it's limitations. anyways what im getting at here is you can only shrink a transistor down so much before it is no longer a transistor. r0bErT4u - love the Zeno reference... :) HHBones - a helium atom is 31 pm in radius so 62 pm in diameter, and helium is the second smallest atom. a zeptometer (which btw i have never heard of until now) is out of reach. a electron is 2.8 fm in radius 5.6 in diameter and how can u have a wire so small it cant hold an electron? how can u have a wire and a transistor so small it cant hold an electron, and still have it carry electrons though it? now dont get me wrong, quantum computing would help address being it will harness the state of the electron, but i'm not holding my breath for them to create a fully working quantum computer, let alone have one in every home. The fundamental limit on the rate of quantum dynamics:
the unified bound is tight
Lev B. Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli
ten quadrillion more than what? How many Operations Per Second do today's fastest processors spit out? Moore's Law hasn't ended, just lithographic processes and silicon chips. There are a variety of new technologies chomping at the bit to take over where silicon transistor chips left off. Here's one: (that guy may be more than just a little over-excited, but the technology is real) MIM diodes and memristors may have a large impact on the amount of practical performance you can get out of a chip as well by shrinking and consolidating chip features (and even bringing in features that used to have to sit off the chip). We have a long, long way to go before we hit performance limits of computing, and once those limits are reached undoubtedly they'll just start building bigger. Can't get any higher htan an exaflop? No problem, build a cluster of 12 exaflop chips. Most modern software is moving toward multithreading (you can even write multithreaded web applications in javascript on real browsers), so the performance advantages of multi-core CPUs and clusters is being realized on a consumer level. Justen Robertson - i beleve you are missinformed of what moore's law is and so is the article moores law only says that every 18 months the number of transistors will double on a chip, it has nothing to do with clock speed or the performance on benchmark tests. two this question is not about moore's law directly. this question has to do with clock speed not FLOPS, flops and clock speed are different and seperate from each other, clock speed can impact the FLOPS a computers tests at, but is not necessarily a direct relation of how fast a computer can perform
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it is impossible to say....although the speed of light and such to come into play...you have to remember there is much more too that...for example..CPU even today can execute multiple instructions at the same time....so as the architecture of CPU changes...we can go faster and faster...the CPU or the future will probably have a much different architecture..which can execute thousands of instructions at the same time....that my guess we wont max out anytime soon...plus we have multi core CPU..so yeah |
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I'm sure we'll be going to an era when we're trying to minimize electrical components, and replacing them with light or something else. Somehow. I know we will be able to see back in the past, but I really don't think we'll be doing anything else with it. |
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Quantum computing is the be all and end all of modern day computing, it will render current methods of encryption obsolete. Put into simple terms, you feed it a mathematical equation and it will spit out every possible answer that every universe holds in every reality and every given time... you then filter the results. This is faster as it works at a quantum level but current day physics have yet to figure out a way to free it from interference (matter can be subjected to disturbance by the slightest of things i.e, a car driving past, someone switching on their household appliances 3 streets away or even a flick of a light switch): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer As for relational speeds, that would depend on the filter mechanism and whatever medium is used to store and write data. Re: cryptography, a new algorithm was released recently which is immune to all known (or theorized) quantum decryption methods. Crypto isn't going anywhere either, it's just going to change. |
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