

World’s first programmable nanoprocessor - potomak
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/nanoprocessor

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Groxx
> _"This work represents a quantum jump forward in the complexity and function
> of circuits built from the bottom up, and thus demonstrates that this
> bottom-up paradigm, which is distinct from the way commercial circuits are
> built today, can yield nanoprocessors and other integrated systems of the
> future,”_

 _Define_ "bottom up", please. I highly doubt that chip manufacturers haven't
been trying extremely hard to make smaller chips, so I'm forced to assume they
mean something else. In the meantime, of course chip manufacturers are
focusing on increasing macro-complexity, because that's where the major speed
increases have been for quite a while (SSE, predictive branching,
hyperthreading, multi-processor, etc)

~~~
woodall
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down_and_bottom-up_design>

~~~
Groxx
> _Bottom-up approaches seek to have smaller (usually molecular) components
> built up into more complex assemblies, while top-down approaches seek to
> create nanoscale devices by using larger, externally-controlled ones to
> direct their assembly._

Absolutely perfect, thanks :) I never knew there were precise uses of these
terms, they've always seemed overly-general to me.

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Sniffnoy
So it's not clear just what the advance here actually _is_. Just how is this
new technique different from the old ones? Could we at least get a size
comparison against current processors?

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tomrod
Yes, but can they _replicate_? If so, we're doomed!
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo>

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RiderOfGiraffes
Related: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206087>

