Tuesday/ the engine of the internet

We marvel at the smartphones we carry, and the information we can get from them – but it’s really the server farms from Amazon and Google and Facebook and Apple that host, find and route the information to us.  Intel makes 99% of the server chips in the world, and the state of the art is the Intel Xeon E5 v4, the company’s latest server chip and the engine of the internet.

From a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article : a top-of-the-line E5 is the size of a postage stamp, retails for $4,115, and uses about 60 % more energy per year than a large Whirlpool refrigerator.  Transistors were 32-nanometers wide in production in 2009, went to 22 nm in 2011, and then to 14 nm in late 2014.   A width of 5 nm is considered the absolute limit of the current technology.   .. but beyond 5nm there will be new materials—some think that carbon nanotubes will replace silicon transistors—and perhaps entirely new technologies, such as neuromorphic computing (circuits designed to mimic the human brain) and quantum computing (individual atomic particles in lieu of transistors)’.

Yes.  I will want one : one of those new quantum computers.

6-14-2016 10-45-14 PM

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