If you believe the headlines around today in some of the major newspapers, scientists are just around the corner from creating a computer one billion times faster than the PC I am currently typing this blog post on.
One billion times! (queue Dr Evil and his pinky finger).
Apparently, scientists at the University of NSW – yes that’s right, right here in Australia, have managed to place a single atom between two pairs of electrodes, which can then be manipulated to act as a transistor.
The scientists involved have also claimed to have ‘cracked’ Moore’s Law. Now, just to remind ourselves, Moore’s Law is attributed (perhaps incorrectly) to Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, who in Electronics Magazine in the 1960’s predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The law has then been expanded to where it is now accepted to suggest that computer processing power doubles every eighteen months.
So, if we consider a computer with processing power one billion times faster that our current ones, that really completely and utterly blows Moore’s Law out of the water. Interestingly, the scientists who created this new nano quantum technology were trying to achieve just that. They had calculated that according to Moore’s Law, 2020 was the deadline for having a single atom transistor and so began trying to beat that deadline. Well, it looks as though they may have done just that.
This leads me to another thought. If we can assume Moore’s law still continues after the new computers are designed, and that is a big assumption considering these scientists apparently just tore that law to shreds, but let’s just say it was ‘the exception that proves the rule’ (I hate that expression), and work with it. Performing some exponential calculations, this means that 12 years from now we will have computers 1,024 billion times faster than what we have currently!
Which means that by 2024 machines will have become self aware and taken over the earth and eradicated the virus known to them as human kind. Or perhaps, humans would have used the new super computers to eradicate all disease and environmental problems and be living a peaceful utopian lifestyle. Who knows, I’m no futurist, but if I could get my hands on one of those new quantum PC’s, I reckon it would have a good chance of calculating the answer.
