

Physicist proposes a new type of computing at SXSW - chunky1994
http://gigaom.com/2014/03/10/physicist-proposes-a-new-type-of-computing-at-sxsw-check-out-orbital-computing/

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Permit
It looks like the speaker, Josh Turner, gave a similar talk here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy7y6a1okd4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy7y6a1okd4)

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officialjunk
the quality of that video is much better than the official site's:
[https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/community/past-
lectures/quant...](https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/community/past-
lectures/quantum-lightswitch-new-direction-ultrafast-electronics)

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grej
When I clicked the link, I was certain it was going to be Stephen Wolfram.
Glad to see I was wrong :) Nothing against the man. He's a genius - it's just
that he's EVERYWHERE.

In all seriousness, this looks really cool. It is yet to be seen which
technology will be most cost effective and performant, but between optical
computing, 3D transistors, and technologies such as this, the exponential rise
in the price/performance of computing power looks like it is not going to
stall out any time in the next 10-15 years.

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trhway
>the exponential rise in the price/performance of computing power looks like
it is not going to stall out any time in the next 10-15 years.

research is good, yet it isn't enough for progress. You need driving force
like market competition. With AMD out of the game (hopefully temporarily)
Intel, with Ivy Bridge, went of to sell smaller chips (instead of doubling the
number of cores on the same area chip) for the same money and with Haswell
they decided that they can sell it much longer before introducing new
generation (Broadwell). We need AMD back, or much faster ARMs, or whatever to
start breathing into Intel's neck again ...

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GarvielLoken
The next revolution is widespread GPGPU programming, which can yield great
increase in performance when leverage correctly. Java 8 already have libraries
for HSA and Java 9 will support it out of the box. And this is AMD lead
technology.

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Avshalom
While i'm vaguely excited for HSA i'm pretty skeptical of anything that needs
to be 'leveraged correctly' there's a history of sufficiently smart compilers
not materializing.

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sharpneli
Depends. Multithreading is a common method nowadays despite sufficiently smart
compilers not existing. It just requires someone who knows what they are
doing, just like good multithreaded code.

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Zenst
Isn't this just a flavour of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics)
?

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gradi3nt
No. Spintronics still uses electron transport, but the electrons are spin
polarized. Atoms aren't individually excited in spintronics.

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leni536
Any link to the original scientific article this came from?

