Tag Archives: Intel

How much smaller can it get?

Atoms are really tiny, their dimension of the order of 0.1 nm (1 tenth of a billionth of a meter). You often hear that atoms are basically empty space, that if you have their nucleus scaled up to the size of a soccer ball and place it at the centre …

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Copying the brain

Crunching data faster and faster is what computer industry has been doing over the last 60 years, tracking with amazing precision Moore’s law. Since 2014/2015 Moore’s Law has reached its limit, first in the economics (the price per transistor is no longer decreasing) and then in density (we can no …

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Changing the world, one nanometer at a time

I found the header for this post on the website of ASML, a company at the leading edge of lithography technology, the engine of the semiconductor industry. They have a wide range of lithographic systems including the most advanced Extreme UltraViolet Lithographic systems (EUVL) using wavelength of 13.5 nm. With …

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Happy Birthday 4004!

I started to work in 1971 and after a few months I made my first acquaintance with the 4004. It was an extraordinary chip, the first microprocessor ever, firstly manufactured in March 1971, fifty years ago, packaging an unbelievable 2,300 transistors. I remember how excited all people around me were, …

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Exascale computing is getting near

It looks like the roadmap towards Exascale computer power is – almost – on track. The University of Florida is expecting a 700 PFLOPs computer to become operational early next year. That would be 30% short of an Exascale power (a billion billion instructions per second). Interestingly -watch the clip- …

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Designing chips for AI

Data Centres are growing in size and processing capacity to manage the increased size and flow of data. As the Clouds they are hosting are evolving to perform more processing intensive tasks and in particular the ones involved in artificial intelligence -training, inferencing- there is an interest for chips that …

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Transforming computation for AI

One of the problem with present AI is that we have (basically) stopped to create “intelligent” algorithms and took the approach of creating algorithms that by self-learning can get smarter and smarter. Problem is, this self-learning needs tons of data and it looks like we are approaching a sort of …

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Has Quantum Supremacy been achieved?

Scientists have been dreaming and discussing Quantum Computers for at least 50 years (for a nice timeline of ideas and implementation of Quantum Computing click here) but the construction of an effective QC has proved elusive. Big players, like Google, IBM, NASA in the US, National Scientific organisations in Japan, …

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Loihi is upping its “neurones” to 8 million

Several years ago, at the beginning of this decade, researchers started to look into computer architectures that would mimic the neuronal networks we find in our brain, in particular networks where storage and computation was one and the same. DARPA launched the project SyNAPSE to foster the creation of neuromorphic …

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