The Computers Processors You Will Use When Your Middle Aged

By Jan Gray

Have you noticed something recently about the new computer processors? You should have noticed that there speed is hovering around 3 or 4 Ghz and never really gets any faster. Instead all that is happening is that companies are adding more of the same chip to improve processing power (dual core, quad core). Current silicon based chips have a limit imposed upon them due to the physical limits of the materials used to construct them.

There are three ways we could go from here. One is quantum computing. Here is where atoms are essentiall cooled to a point in which they longer move (this was thought to have been impossible for a long time [known as absolute zero]). These atoms are them manuipulated with lasers in such a way as to form a computational device (how is an extremely complex endevor i do not wish to traverse at this point in time). The point is that a current computer uses pit and grooves or 0's and 1's as a foundation for information. It takes an input, does the computation on that input, and gives an answer in a linear fashion. Quantum computers will do computations simultainiously and a great deal of computations for that matter. It will do two the the power of the number of input bits. For example if there was a 100 input bits a quantum computer could do a thousand billion billion billion computations simulatiniously as opposed to one. And in terms of bits, just for comparison, the playstation 3 has a 128 bit processor.

Another is optical processing. Here information will travel to different parts of the system with packets of light or photons as opposed to todays processors which travel in little wires engrained within the chip. Aside from the obvious advantage of a higher processing power these processors will also use significantly less power.

Possibly the closest new computing system is the nano-computer. A group calling themselves the "dream team" has announced that they will have one out by November 1, 2011. The team, lead by Bill Spence publisher of Nanotechnology magazine, has never actually met each other and only communicate though the internet. They keep a tight lid on exactly they plan on making a computer out of atoms but the computer is literally expected to be billions of times faster than todays computers.