New IBM, Sony PowerPC chip cracks Moore's Law

* salivates *

 

Isn't this title misleading?

What does a faster chip have to do with Moore's Law?

 

Well Moore's Law, which is really more of an observation Moore made back in the early days of computing, hypothesized that advances in chip production methods, facilities, and technology would mean that chip speeds would double every 18-24 months. As this has held to be rather accurate, it has been called a Law. However, if this Cell chip is released in a year at current projections, it is 10x faster than current chips, and therefore beyond being projected or predicted by Moore's Law.

 

This is supposed to come out today, can anybody find a press release?

 

hopefully it won't morph into Murphy's law...

 

This is a popular mistake to make. What he actually said was that the number of trasnistors per integrated circuit would grow expontially (double every 2 years). Proof. This does not directly equate to doubling in processing power (additional transistors could be used for things like larger caches or in the case of x86 chips CISC to RISC translators).

 

Yeah, that's right. Its the number of transistors that's supposed to double every.....18 months, wasn't it? Nothing directly related to speed, since other factors affect speed as well.

 

so, is the chip going to be on PCs soon? are we going to see it on Macs?

 

In terms of projected capability, this new chip seems almost too good to be true. Hopefully it isn't.

The fact that development was shared between Sony, Toshiba and IBM leads me to believe that there will be a lot of hurdles bringing this to the Mac platform, if it is suitable. More likely may be an adoption of some cell design features by IBM on it's Power line, including future Apple-bound CPUs.

 

Maybe as the "G6" computers next year?

 

I wonder what the power consumption will be like.

 

Ha! G6 next year, You so crazy!

 

With Apple anything is possible. I'm sure that as soon as it technologically possible Steve will introduce it on the Mac. Possibly be the first to introduce it on a personal CPU. An interesting thought also is will the Cell processor end the G monacher. Some have mentioned a change to C.

 

When will it arrive

 

Forget about the Cell, when are we going to see computer chips made from glass and uses photonic gates instead of silicon transistors? Wake me up when there is actual news.