This MONTH special: MANNING1 about Earthquake Technology

[George Necola]

George Necola asked me to do an article on music computers and "earthquake" technology that might shake up the whole recording scene.
As the topic is so vast I’ve tried to keep it brief.
here are the points....

**EARTHQUAKE TECHNOLOGY**
Every so often major tech changes occur that have significant impacts on the way we do things. its my firm belief that "you aint seen nothing yet".
i believe further major "earthquake" changes are possible of immense proportions.
my FEAR is a lot of smaller operations are going to be caught out. Spend too early and might not have any money left when the "real good stuff"
arrives. .. i.e. ...the "earthquakes" of processors/technology.
in summary THINK carefully about your purchases.




Now i'm going to talk a little about TRUE "earthquake" technology. When it will arrive I have no way of knowing. Lot’s of R n' D is continuing all around the globe, like the invention of the transistor...

If it arrives its going to really have major immense impacts. up till this point in time computers basically have been based on silicon technology. (and lots of other things of course). But silicon technology is getting very old/long in the tooth, and there is only so much processing power one can squeeze out of it.
The "holy grail" of computing is to produce computers with unlimited processing potential.

whoopee..."thousands of audio/video tracks and plug ins"...."party time".
mind you how many folks will need this, is debatable.




Now i would like you to look at your hand (NO!! I'M NOT MAD!!!!)
an old physics prof once said to me if you don’t understand the works of nature/tech
look at your surroundings carefully...because nature provides lots of clues
to the future regarding things you don’t understand. Believe it or not inside your hand is untapped immense power. Within a substance are lots of little atoms. Within each atom are lots of little particles (read up on Google sometime "fundamental particles").



NOW...what if we could control the activity of these immense number of particles,
use them logically, control their state, as we needed more computing power
we just throw in a few more banks of atoms? think now of a huge bank of atoms
in a structure of processors.

i.e. ...billions and billions of little particles you never see. (Just like things you never see under your garden or in the sea.)
now....if there were some way of controlling the activity of these particles we could have immense computing power.
For example if we applied the binary system to them somehow and if we could control and make a particle act in only two states of being.
If we aligned them one way...that would be a binary one and another way a binary zero.
the crux of the matter is building "something" that is able to control these billions of particles in this fashion.




i.e. load increases (e.g. .. I’m running out of plug in processing power)...
go to a menu and add another bank of processor atoms.
In summary a fluid reconfigurable processor based on atomic particles
and the particles within the atom.
In summary like data can be thought of as a data base consisting of records....
e.g. ..in recording studios song projects and tracks. Think of a data base of computing power.
Consisting of atomic structures that are controllable just like your brain controls your hand.

Such a data base of atom based processing power is the holy grail of computing. Completely flexible and of great processing power. a true "earthquake" technology.





Conclusion:
In summary ....whichever group of scientists or business are able to do this and
bring to market an atom based computer at a cheap price will be hugely successful.
To use a crude analogy....remember your iron filings experiments at school?
and remember aligning the particles? Same idea crudely within the atomic structure.
we are controlling the behavior of the atomic structure and its components. For many years people have talked about the possibility of the existence of aliens
(and I’m not going to get into this subject...lol) but i suspect if they do in fact exist they will be using computers based on atomic technology probably of the nature I have described.
I also suspect that their implementations will be elegantly simple. The best solutions always are very simple. In summary I believe the future of computing lies in harnessing
and applying two basics area of physics: Magnetism and Atomics.


Article-copyright by manning1
Content by manning1

[Anonymatt]

Something fun to consider Manning.

A related quote from Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near":

"To appreciate the feasibility of computing with no energy and no heat [reversible computing], consider the computation that takes place in an ordinary rock. Although it may appear that nothing much is going on inside a rock, the approximately 10^25 atoms in a kilogram of matter are actually extremely active. Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields. All of this activity represents computation, even if not very meaningfully organized.

"We've already shown that atoms can store information at a density of greater than one bit per atom, such as in computing systems built from nuclear magnetic-resonance devices. University of Oklahoma researchers stored 1,024 bits in the magnetic interactions of the protons of a single molecule containing nineteen hydrogen atoms. Thus, the state of the rock at any one moment represents at least 10^27 bits of memory.

"In terms of computation, and just considering the electromagnetic interactions, there are at least 10^15 changes in state per bit per second going on inside a 2.2-pound rock, which effectively represents about 10^42 (a million trillion trillion trillion) calculations per second. Yet the rock requires no energy input and generates no appreciable heat. "

Anyway, it's all speculative and sounds silly in 2006, but I suppose the key point is that information is information is information, despite its physical scale.

[manning1]

matt....
yep..all those lovely proton, lepton and meson and other particle families .....
tons of em all within the atom. all begging to be controlled...lol.
eg.....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_particles

[kelldammit]

it's bound to happen. i'm sure 10 years ago people thought that doping molecular components into ic's was sci-fi and just "out there".

[George Necola]

the future happens now:

Cell processor PCIe-card

http://www.computerbase.de/news/hard...-be-prozessor/

sorry it's german.. and it's 8000$ dfegad


UA-Audio!!! go and get me some nice plugins on this ****

[lukejs]

Our current system is binary, just two alternatives, 0 or 1. The future of computing will probably be processing using light, instead of electricity. With light, you have more options than just 0 and 1.... you have a spectrum .

[George Necola]

you have more options than just 0 and 1.... you have a spectrum .

you think that's good? imagine what microsoft can do with more options than 0 and 1..



got your point.. datastorage with light is definitly comming.

[FFTT]

You make a good point that smaller outfits will suffer the most if they blow their tech upgrade budgets too soon.

It's taken 6 months+ for most of the applications and plugins just to catch up with
the hardware and the hardware is leap-frogging so fast, that you might as well wait
IF... you can afford to wait.

For now I would hold off until Apple releases Leopard shipped in the box and we see what happens with Digi and LogicPro 8.

There's also little point in buying any Microsoft based hardware until Vista ships.

So it seems that the best timing will be mid to late 2007.

Quad and Octacore processing will soon be the norm and ECC RAM prices should come
way down.

[manning1]

re....binary/ light...
i have a feeling that binary will be with us for quite some time yet.
lets revisit in 20 years....by which time ..if i'm wrong.... people can throw rotten eggs at me in the old folks home...lol...for retired computer people.

as to light she is a fickle mistress...but photonic computing is an interesting concept. ....>>>>http://www.rmrc.org/photonics/photon1.htm
notice some of the problems.
and heres an article (way out there !!) on teleportation !!!!
and atomic computing.....>>>>http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/r...eportation.htm

[Bhang]

This is obvious. Talk about a whole lot of filler with no meat. All sorts of these types of computers have been in the works for quite some time. Biological computers, chemical computers, etc. None of these are ready yet and it will be quite some time before they are ready for consumers, not to mention affordable.
I'm sticking with silicon until I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

[Jay Kahrs]

There's a pretty nifty article in the new issue of EM that talks about this stuff...chips running under hyper cooling that reach speeds of 500ghz and how we're maybe eight years away from that point.

My old PIII 500 with a gig of RAM is pletny fast for general websurfing and can still run 24 tracks at 44.1 without blinking...but whew!!! 500gHz??? That's just mind-numbingly fast!

Great illistrations BTW!

[Improv]

But how can we hope to control something we don't really understand. Sure, we have models of atomic structure and the heirarchy of subatomic particles, but the more we investigate them the more of them we find. It seems there is no limit to the amount of energy contained within, and we are witnessing such small scales of magnitude in this regard that I don't even think we can get our heads around what is really possible.

The proliferation of "fundamental" particles and the hall of mirrors that results, I think, is indicative of a lack of undertstanding of our very nature. Fortunately (or unfortunately if you're a traditional scientist), I think meditation will get us to the next step much faster than experimentation. That paradigm shift will be a slow one, but I think it will happen.

Just look at how, these days, theoretical physicists are telling experimental ones what to look for as apposed to the traditional method of observation first, theory second. Very telling, I think...

I could talk about this kinda stuff all day.

[George Necola]

thank you very much manning for taking the time and write an article.

if someone of you feels like "I have to tell the world something" don't hesitate to PM me.

cheers George

[manning1]

all the best george.

[tINY]

Interesting to think about.

The trick is that there is a high threshold before a different technology will become common. There are a lot of factories to make cheap silicon and a lot of technology that supports it (batteries and power, cooling by forced convection, micro code and operating systems, differential signaling across FR4....).

Then there is the infrastructure - like the talk about a Hydrogen-Based fuel infrastructure. There may be some advantages, but the cost of switching over an established industry is immense. Anybody remember the tech bubble collapse 6 years ago - people couldn't finance the fiber-optic communication system that continued information tech growth required. I have fiber optic to my house now, but that was recent (and only one option as the cable industry and improved DSL and sattelite technology filled a lot of the gap in the mean time).

It may very well get down to single atom computing in an evolutionary manner - the gates on FETs in processors are only a couple of atoms thick and pre-stressed. That's a mechanical stress placed on an oxide layer using fairly standard silicon processing techniques (refined a bit in recent years).

I think the first place you will see big leaps is in the moving of signals around inside the box you call a computer. Sure, you can make a serial bus run at 10Gbits per lane - sattelites have done this already. But, can you do it with a substrate that has to be cheap because people won't pay the extra $500-$1000 per computer for better PCBoards? There is money to be made patenting an easy to manufacture, inexpensive system of getting signals between components that works at high data rates. Optical? Lithography techniques for small waveguides? Maybe we could get Thing from the Adams family to take messages back and forth....

There is already a change going on - people are less concerned about the clock rate of the processor and more worried about bus speeds and memory cashe size. Rightly so. Getting data from here to there is the slow part. I think that will be a big problem for a while: whether you have silicon, light manipulating crystals or clouds of electrons in organic matter for the processing.



-tINY