Sir Clive's chip

[jfox@xxxxxxxx (Jeff Fox)]

Dear MISC readers;

I certainly agree with Sir Clive Sinclair about the problems with PC
technology.  I did notice that the site said:

>It would have to be manufactured using a specially developed semi conductor
>process. I've been talking to a company in this
>country and were at a fairly advance stage.

I wonder how much of the speedup and power savings is due to this special
process.  I look forward to learning more about the architecture and
the special semi conductor proceses involved.

It reminds me that the first thing that attracted me to the Forth engines
way back when was the idea that the design was so small that it might
be reaonable to implement it on new emerging technologies.  I figured
if you were experimenting with Josephson Junctions or single electron
transistors or quantum tunneling transistors or optical transistors 
or whatever that it made more sense to consider implementing a 
processor with a few thousand transistors than one requiring millions 
of transistors.

In fact Chuck has been involved in some of those kinds of discussions.
People get upset when we talk about 2ns in .8u and we like to think
about where we would be if we had a .15u fab to play with or could
ride on some special semiconductor process.  People have looked into 
implmenting MISC stuff in things that make .15u silicon look very slow 
by comparison.  When Chuck mentioned the difference between
silicon and diamond in regard to the micro thermodynamics the other
day in a staff meeting I recalled the discussions he had about doing 
a MISC processor on diamond.  Lots of pie in the sky ideas, some
make you think.

Jeff Fox