Computers and Computer Chips There has been a breakthrough in computer chips and this one is monumental. Everyone who is interested in computers got very excited when AMD, a computer chip maker, announced they were coming out with a chip for home use which would have 64 cores. Let me explain what this means. Each core is equivalent to a computer on a single core machine. Not only does the AMD chip approximately equal the power of 64 cores, but each core is able to use two streams which means each core can do two sequences of data elements at the same time. When I first started in computing this was unheard of. What the computer industry had done was first to shrink down the size of the elements on a chip by making them so small over time they were able to get them down to a 5 nanometer size in some instances. One nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter. Put another way, a nanometer is 0.000001 of a millimeter. I am talking about some pretty small stuff. During the time when computer chip companies were making the parts smaller, every once in a while, they thought they couldn’t get them any smaller because things would be so close together there would be a problem, but they were able to solve this. They were having a hard time trying to pass 5 nanometers, after all 7 nanometers meant the transistors on the chip were only 1/10000th the width of a human hair. What were these companies to do? Many decided to continue their research in shrinking the size of the parts inside a CPU which is the Central Processing Unit which is the chip that is the heart of the computer. They also decided to use another technique to get more from these chips and that was layering the chips on top of each other and connecting these layers so the chips would act as one unit. It was a brilliant idea, especially since there seemed to be a problem getting these chips to run much faster. They decided since a huge increase in speed was not coming anytime soon, being able to perform more actions in the same time would be almost as good, so the new chips were born. Lately we have been hearing a lot about quantum computing, which is a completely different system of computing and which is not available for home use and barely available commercially. First of all, quantum computers need to be cooled. You might say so do the CPUs in traditional computers and you would be correct, but the cooling needed for a quantum computer is on the order of near absolute zero. They also are affected by magnetism so heavy shielding is needed. A traditional computer uses bytes, but a quantum computer used qbits. As of the writing of this article a quantum computer can only use a maximum of 50 qbits. Since quantum computers have three switches available instead of the two for traditional or what are now being called classical computers, they have far more power. Traditional computers operate on “1” which is on and “0” which is off. Quantum computers use on, off and both on and off at the same time. Computer companies are always trying to create more powerful chips for traditional computers and one company has created a computer chip which is phenomenal. The company is Cerebras. They have built a CPU chip with 2.6 trillion 7 nanometers transistors and 850,000 cores. It is not for home use because it is the size of a chip wafer. A chip wafer is a wafer which contains about 84 chips. Cerebras has used an entire wafer to create one CPU. Can you imagine the power of this, I know I can’t? It also is an electricity hog and I am sure it might be hard to keep cool. If we keep doing things like this, the traditional computers may not be able to be caught by the Quantum computers for a long time. When 3 nanometer fabrication becomes available at Cerebras I can’t even imagine what they might build. One of the problems for companies needing chips is the fact the number of companies building them has shrunk. Besides meaning less competition and higher prices, it also means if chip companies are doing well, they may all decide on holding off developing new tech. The new chips from Ceberes might have certain customers like the US government. This wafer might be used to create the most powerful computer in the world. It could also turn out a custom built computer using the Ceberes chip might be able to use three or more of these chips at once. At three chips each the super computer would have about 2.4 million cores to use for processing power. Not all computers are created equal. Years ago, when the Amiga computer came out, it used a series of custom chips to take off some of the strain on the CPU, allowing it to do more. The idea was a good one and I bet some of the government supercomputers might utilize this type of system. Experts say a new chip can be extremely expensive and they said if would cost about 650 million dollars to research and build. Every time we want to go smaller, it costs more money to develop smaller transistors on a chip. The Apple company is so flush with money they have decided to design and manufacture their own computer chips. They became the first company to reach a value of two trillion dollars. Only two years ago they had become the first company to reach one trillion dollars. They did this during the Coronavirus when the economy had shrunk due to the lockdowns and such. They claim in 2022 their computers will have their own chips in them. I would imagine the chips in the IPhone and tablets and everything else will be manufactured by them also. This should increase their profit margin quite a bit as if they needed that. When we look at the future of computing, we can see something coming which most experts believe will be here by the end of the decade. They believe computers will change significantly. People will be able to wear their computers and the change in battery technology will boost them even more. It is believed the display will be head mounted, perhaps on a corner of eyeglasses and the sound will come from a tiny invisible ear plug.
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