The next technology the american consumer won't be able to do without.

[Requia ☣]

100+ GHz computer chips.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/05/ibm_graphene_transistor/

[Captain Utopia]

Neat.

Now let's think up ways to saturate the additional capacity!

I'm most excited about the prospect of realtime raytracing.  I've been programming with graphics shaders again recently, and although the available power there is phenomenal, there are too many limitations built into the hardware pipelines - they are streamlined like a racecar - you can't take them off-road smoothly.

Presumably it would allow for faster networking, although I'm a little stumped at what use that would be -- there isn't an equivalent increase in storage capacity that I know of.  Though perhaps you could use that to your advantage by generating so much spurious traffic that your ISP can't possibly keep records of your activity - P2P live untraceable streaming?

[Requia ☣]

Storage did a similar jump a while back, this levels that ratio a bit.

The limitation on internet speeds is last mile stuff, the backbone is a long way away from being strained.  Getting the speed up is about building infrastructure.

[Jasper]

I just want to rub my balls on this.  I hope that costs less than actually buying one.

[Kai]

I for one am excited about speed increases on computers. It literally takes weeks to run maximum parsimony analysis on sequences with most computers, which leads to using distance-related phenetic approaches like maximum likelyhood and Bayesian instead because they are faster. The more computing power out there, the sooner systematics can be rid of those error inducing algorithms.

[Requia ☣]

I should explain that these won't necessarily make anything faster, I'm not sure about what Kai mentions, but for general day to day computing   The only things a normal person might do that would be made faster by one of these is video encoding and gaming (the stuff will be very rapidly adapted to graphics cards no doubt).

Bottlenecks on the RAM, Hard drive, and network still remain.  Though Parkinson's law has never been wrong yet, so expect to need to buy one of these in order to run Windows 9.

[Requia ☣]

Oh, and I will be laughing my ass off if IBM keeps up its current fab technology deals and AMD/ATI gets this but intel doesn't.   

[Jasper]

I'm tired of Intel, and I hope this sinks them.

I hope they'll bundle these systems with racetrack memory, which IBM is also developing.  Perhaps that could solve parts of the bottleneck.

[Kai]

I should explain that these won't necessarily make anything faster, I'm not sure about what Kai mentions, but for general day to day computing   The only things a normal person might do that would be made faster by one of these is video encoding and gaming (the stuff will be very rapidly adapted to graphics cards no doubt).

Bottlenecks on the RAM, Hard drive, and network still remain.  Though Parkinson's law has never been wrong yet, so expect to need to buy one of these in order to run Windows 9.

Awww. 

[Soylent Green]

I should explain that these won't necessarily make anything faster, I'm not sure about what Kai mentions, but for general day to day computing   The only things a normal person might do that would be made faster by one of these is video encoding and gaming (the stuff will be very rapidly adapted to graphics cards no doubt).

Bottlenecks on the RAM, Hard drive, and network still remain.  Though Parkinson's law has never been wrong yet, so expect to need to buy one of these in order to run Windows 9.

From what Kai said I assume that it is an algorithm, in which case an increase in CPU speed would vastly decrease the time it takes for the algorithm to be completed.

[Captain Utopia]

If you can keep all the data in registers or cache, then yeah.. but the question is how much data are you comparing between different taxa?  E.g. here it looks (from my uneducated quick scan) like it's comparing dna sequences.. in which case you're talking quite a bit of data -- wiki puts the human genome at around 750mb uncompressed.  CPU cache sizes are (I think - I don't keep up) still in the single figures of mb, so I'd guess you'd have to be focussed upon a pretty small chunk of the genome for this to give a significant boost, assuming nothing else changes.

[Cain]

Given my current laptop has a 1.66 GHz computer chip, one of these would be nice.  Shit, I can't even play games that came out a year before this model.

[Jasper]

If you can keep all the data in registers or cache, then yeah.. but the question is how much data are you comparing between different taxa?  E.g. here it looks (from my uneducated quick scan) like it's comparing dna sequences.. in which case you're talking quite a bit of data -- wiki puts the human genome at around 750mb uncompressed.  CPU cache sizes are (I think - I don't keep up) still in the single figures of mb, so I'd guess you'd have to be focussed upon a pretty small chunk of the genome for this to give a significant boost, assuming nothing else changes.

I think I read that the new 100Ghz chips also have gargantuan caches, to the order of 1gb.

Which is stupidly large, if this is true.

[Requia ☣]

Unlikely, I can definitely see card slot processors with huge L3 caches making a comeback, but that much memory would take up a lot of physical space with the large process being used at the moment.

[Jasper]

As you say.  Any proc that fast is pointless without a gigantic cache to match.

Another article made the 1gb cache claim:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1046135/new-chinese-chips-pose-threat-intel

Using 128-bit technology, the architecture, codenamed 'Long March', could deliver performance of up to 100GHz in as little as 18 months, say researchers. Built on a new 90 nm (nanometer) process, the Long March chips feature 1Gb level 2 cache and prototypes have been demonstrated running at 5GHz with no special cooling.