[MachineForth] Chuck's 25x and IBM's Blue Gene

[Jeff Fox <fox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Waynesma wrote:
> Still keep in mind:
> That 400Mhz-1Ghz cheap edram.  It might be of interest
> to investrors in a future design.

I have little idea any more what investors want
they seem to want tried and true, proven, technology
in wide use and don't want to risk being first at anything.

They have 400Mhz in 0.15u and 600Mhz to 1G in 0.13u 
while Chuck is saying 1G at 1.8u so he is still an
order of magnitude ahead because of his improved
transistor model and superior layout technique.
That is transistor level.  At the chip level his
approach and language ideas translate into more
compact elegant code and much smaller nodes with
much fewer transitors.

> IBM's 210Ghz silicon transistor process.
> http://www.ibm.com/news/2001/06/25.phtml

To get 2400 MIPs Chuck must have transistors
of at least 25G.  Going from 1.8u to 0.13u
alone should yield 200G without any exotic
new technology being used. Chuck isn't working 
with SiGe and vertical flow transistor design 
and fabrication or single electron transistors 
or quantum tunneling transistors or diamond
semiconductor and he could gain orders of 
magnitude doing that too. He still seems to at 
least one order of magnitude ahead at the transistor 
level when you remove those kinds of factors.

> Maybe he could become involved in some alternative
> technology, say Optical computing.

He has talked with folks with exotic technology 
with 1000000 Ghz transistors who wanted to see
what his designs would do on that.  100M Mips per
node with 3D fabrication and no heat issues?
But Chuck is still working with commonly available
silicon fabrication in 1.8u.

> > Chuck Moore's law seems different than
> > Gordon Moore's law.
> 
> Out of curiosity, are they somehow distantly related ?

I don't think so. Chuck might have mentioned it
or gotten better funding.  

I saw a presentation by Gordon at a NASA conference 
on parallel processing and the grand challange problems.  
I thought Gordon was very funny, entertaining, and 
politically incorrect like Chuck.  He scolded all 
these NASA scientists for wasting all his tax money 
trying to outspend each other.  It sounded like what 
I say about the PC industry marketing strategy, but of 
course they do have absurd budgets and their status is 
all about who can spend more of our tax money. 

Gordon also said that he was president of the "Don't
Behead Workstations Society."  He felt that putting
workstations on rack to make workstation farms and
removing their monitors and keyboards was cruel and
should not be allowed.  It reminded me of Chuck
questioning if turning of a PC was ethical. ;-)
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