7. Near & Far Horizons: Processing Power in the Future

On the near horizon are ultra-tiny multimedia superchips, billion-bit memory chips, teraflop supercomputers, stripped-down Internet PCs, and Intercast TV/Internet PCs, On the far horizon are technologies using gallium arsenide, superconducting materials, optical processing, ' nanotechnology, and DMA.

How far we have come. The onboard guidance computer used in 1969 by the Apollo 11 astronauts—who made the first moon landing—-had 2 kilobytes of RAM and 36 kilobytes of ROM, ran at a speed of 1 megahertz, weighed 70 pounds, and required 70 watts of power. Even the Mission Control computer on the ground had only 1 megabyte of memory. "It cost $4 million and took up most of a room," says a space physicist who was there. Today you can easily buy a personal computer with 90 times the processing power and 10 times the memory for just a couple of thousand dollars.

Future Developments: Near Horizons

The old theological question of how many angels could fit on the head of a pin has a modern counterpart: the technological question of how many cir­cuits could fit there. Computer developers are obsessed with speed and power, constantly seeking ways to promote faster processing and more main memory in a smaller area. Some of the most promising directions, already discussed, are RISC chips and parallel processing. Some other research-and-development paths being explored in the near term include the following:

e-tiny multimedia superchips: The general-purpose microprocessor we've described in this chapter, such as Intel's Pentium, is about to be replaced. Several companies (Intel, IBM, MicroUnity, Chromatic Research, Philips) have announced they are working on versions of a new breed of chip called a media processor.

As we stated in Chapter 1, multimedia refers to technology that pre­sents information in more than one medium, including text, graphics, ani­mation, video, music, and voice. A media processor, or so-called "multi­media accelerator," is a chip with a fast processing speed that can do specialized multimedia calculations and handle several multimedia func­tions at once, such as audio, video, and three-dimensional animation.

MicroUnity, for example, is using tricks that will pack perhaps three times as many transistors on a chip as there are on a standard Pentium, which is about the same size. With this process, the company expects to obtain multimedia chips that will operate at 1 billion cycles per second— five times the speed of a 200-megahertz Pentium Pro.

Superior processing speeds arc necessary if the media and communica­tions industries are to realize their visions for such advances as realistic videogame animation and high-quality video phones. An all-digital TV, for instance, needs media processors to perform the calculations for the mil­lion or more dots that make up one frame of video—and 30 such video frames race by each second.

In 1995 two sets of companies—Hitachi and NEC on the one hand, and Motorola, Toshiba, IBM, and Siemens on the other—announced plans to build plants to make memory chips capable of storing 1 billion bits (a gigabit) of data. This is 60 times as much infor­mation as is stored on the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips used in today's latest personal computers. One thumbnail-size piece of sil­icon could then store 10 copies of the complete works of Shakespeare, 4 hours of compact-disk quality sound, or 15 minutes of video images. Engi­neering samples of such chips are expected in 1998.

Intel announced in 1995 that it was building a new supercomputer that would be the first to achieve the goal of cal­culating more than a trillion floating-point operations a second, known as a teraflop. Using 9000 Pentium Pro microprocessors in the configuration known as massively parallel processing, the machine would be applied to the study of nuclear weapons safety, among other things.

The reverse of supercomputers is the stripped-down Internet. PC, or "hollow PC". This appliance—built by Oracle and England's Acorn Computer Group—is designed as an inex­pensive device for cruising the Internet and World Wide Web and for doing basic computing.

The Internet PC doesn't have CD-ROM drives and will not be able to use store-bought software (but software applications can presumably be extracted from the Web). It includes 4 megabytes of main memory, a microprocessor similar to that used in Apple Computer's handheld New­ton devices, a keyboard, mouse, and network connections.

A variation being licensed by Apple is Pippin, a game-player Internet connector that plugs into a TV. Expected to cost about $500, Pippin could boost demand for the Macintosh operating system.

* Intercut TV/Internet PC- Another new technology, developed by Intel, is Intercast, which links the Internet and televisions to microcomputers. Intercast allows PCs equipped with modems to receive broadcast data from the Internet as well as television programming. Thus, you could watch a television news show about Bosnia 011 your computer screen and then, if you wished, look up related historical and geographical information broad­cast by the television network.

Future Developments: Far Horizons

Silicon is still king of semiconductor materials, but researchers are pushing on with other approaches. Most of the following, however, will probably take some time to realize:

* A leading contender in chip technology is gallium arsenide, which allows electrical impulses to be transmitted several times faster than silicon can. Gallium arsenide also requires less power than sil­icon chips and can operate at higher temperatures. However, chip design­ers at present are unable to squeeze as many circuits onto a chip as they can with silicon.

* Superconductors Silicon, as we stated, is a semiconductor; Electricity flows through the material with some resistance. This leads to heat buildup and the risk of circuits melting down. A superconductor, by contrast, is material that allows electricity to flow through it without resistance.

Until recently superconductors were considered impractical because they have to be kept at subzero temperatures in order to carry enough cur­rent for many uses. In 1995, however, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico succeeded in fabricating a high-temperature, flexible, ribbon-like superconducting tape that could carry current at a density of more than 1 million amperes per square centimeter, considered I a sort of threshold for wide practical uses.

While the material is still very cold, it is hot compared to earlier I extremely chilly superconductors. Now, perhaps, superconducting wire will find widespread applications. In computers it could produce circuitry 100 times faster than today's silicon chips.

Today’s computers are electronic; tomor­row's might be op to-electronic-—using light, not electricity. With optical-electronic technology, a machine using lasers, lenses, and mirrors would represent the on-and-off codes of data with pulses of light.

Except in a vacuum, light is faster than electricity. Indeed, fiber-optic networks, which consist of hair-thin glass fibers, can move information at speeds up to 3000 times faster than conventional networks. However, the signals get bogged down when they have to be processed by silicon chips. I Opto-electronic chips would remove that bottleneck.

* Nanotechnology, nanoelectronics, nanostructures, nanofabrication—all start with a measurement known as a nanometer. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, which means we are operating at the level of atoms and molecules. A human hair is approximately 100,000 nanometers in diameter.

Nanotechnology is a science based on using molecules to create tiny machines to hold data or perform tasks. Experts attempt to do "nanofab­rication" by building tiny "nanostructures" one atom or molecule at a time. When applied to chips and other electronic devices, the field is called "nanoelectronics."