Technology Brick Wall

[tw]

We have suspected this was coming for some time now. With transistors now built from gates only two and three atoms wide, the inevitable had to happen. And with high K dielectrics not working as planned (IBM had to halt manufacturing a new design when a Dow Chemical material failed to stay attached to the chip), well:
Intel's Big Shift After Hitting Technical Wall

Processors will now return to concepts used in the 8080 - multiple chips form a CPU. Also expect multiprocessing in desktop machines.

[Razorfish]

Yea I read about this via a slashdot article. It was always inevitable though. They can only make the transistors so small. Good news is that Intel will have to focus on improving their processing algorithems as oppose to relying solely on clock speed.
Bad news of course is that multiple processors=$$.

Similar to the wall CD drive manufacturers hit. Seems like CDs become unstable at speeds over 52x. Improvements on the actual disks will be needed to progress foward.

[jaguar]

This has been coming for a looooong time now, it's slowly filtering down from the big iron Power4-5 type stuff to top end server chips to consumer chips, noone should be surprised. It will take a while I think for software to adapt to fully take advantage of these things.