X-Message-Number: 26089 From: Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 03:03:03 EDT Subject: Uploading technology (1.i.0) Electronics next generation. Uploading technology (1.i.0) There I take my crystal ball to look into the technological future. Because Uploading as I conceive it use rather ordinary electronics components, the subject is limited here to that technology in the comming years. On the computer side, we see now the multiprocessor chip, up to nine for some game station. I don't think it will be pursued beyond two or three years because this would ask for far too much code optimization in all softwares. This is only a transition phase until the real next step, the high electron mobility transistor processor. AMD is said to work on the subject and Intel will do it too. HEMT clock can run at 12 GHz on discrete, large components, the same technology on very small transistors in a microprocessor would get to the 50 GHz mark. When HEMT processors will be introduced, the clock frequency will be in the 5 GHz range at most, but it will have the possibility, with very few add-on to be multiplied by 10. The foundry will have only to tunr the faucet or nearly so. The initial cost is not marginal yet: A new industrial plant must be built for that technology, that is why we have the intermediate step of the multicore processor. What about FPGA? The market is more limited here and comes from big buyers. Prices are not very interesting for the foundry, so they use some production tools used before on the microprocessor factory. That is why current FPGAs have a maximum clock frequency in the 350 MHz range, this is the Pentium 2 technology. It is now used in the FPGA domain. Because the current P4 technology at 2 - 3 GHz will be down graded by the new HEMT, it will be used as the state of art process in the FPGA domain. So this is not big gamble to predict a x10 clock speed for FPGA in the comming years. This will comes with 100 million transistors chips, or nearly one million logical cells. On the ASIC side, a big order could use the HEMT technology and a custom made TRAC could run at 10 GHz with one million or more operational amplifier cells. It could simulate ten uploading quality neurons at the same time and use the time sharing to run 10 millions such blocks, that is, its simulation power would be in the 100 millions neurons range. One brain on 100 chips... Using FPGA at 3 GHz and 1 million logical cells, 50 neurons could be simulated at the same time and one million such package could be implemented in time sharing. This give 50 millions neurons/chip without using custom-made elements. One brain on 200 chips. This will be the technology in 4 - 5 years. Assume the FPGA unit price is in the $1,000 and other elements cost approximatively the same amount, the brain price would be $400,000 in components alone. Yvan Bozzonetti. Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26089