Intels new atomic chip and laptops

.. I understand the new ultra low power atomic chip from intel
(called that because its conductor width is an atom wide apparently)
is going into cell phones first then laptops later.

last winter some expected to see atomic chip laptops out by now.. I
think that was a statement from intel....but not yet, and so far no
noise about the atomic chips actually in cell phones either.

Does anyone have insight on when it will be in laptops at a good
price... paired with atomic solid state hard drive over 120 gig? I
might hold out for that hummer if it wont be more than a year.






Phil scott

 

Based on what I read in the articles below, I am not buying one for
anything to run SolidWorks. Saving a few watts is not going to help
me one whit.

http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/03/1210214

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/202845/intel-atom.html

"We ran tests in Vista on the latter, the 1.6GHz desktop Atom 230 with
2GB of RAM, and as anticipated despite the hysterical hype,
performance isn't going to set the world alight."

Bo

 

I rather doubt that. You'd then have quantum wires AND it
would probaby be impossible to dope a semiconductor ... you'd
have regions of the dopant but no conductor.
Quantum wires: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_wire

They are "low power" & "hafnium-based 45nm microarchitecture".
http://www.intel.com/technology/atom/?cid=cim:ggl|atom_us_brand|kB42F|s

An atom of Copper has a diameter of ~ 2.80* 10^-10 m and 1 nm
= 10^-9 m so you could fit about 161 Copper atoms side by side
into that 45nm (check my math <g>). PLUS there is depth.

 

Thanks for the links.


I do about 3/4 of my work on my boat or in my motorhome away from
shore power. The more battery life I get the less i have to run a
generator.

1.6ghz may not be too much of a problem if you have a fast video card
made to process vector graphics such as the Nvideo quantum pro with
520 ram... (not their gaming model).


Phil scott

 

I think you are right of course re the mask process.. maybe the talk
about 1 atom wide is just an ideal or relates to ion implant or newer
types of lazer graphics that embed conductive materials deep into a
wafer.

I ran into a guy in Ben Lomond calif, early 80's (into the mountains
from Santa Cruz) deals in used semi conductor equipment. he bought a
sputtering type machine used to vaporiize metal onto masked silicon
discs under a vacuum as you are referring to. He showed me around
his shop and the insides of one of the machines and about half inch
thick build up of platinum on the chamber walls that he had been
chizzling off to fund his life style. he said when he got the machine
(at auction) it had an inch thick platinum disc in it, about 16" in
diameter... I cant verify the disc but I could see the thick build up
on the walls of the sputtering chamber... the sputtering pot is small
though, it was about an inch cubed. I dont know what they would need
a thick platinum disc for.


Phil scott

 

Not for conventinal semiconductors. See the bit on Quantum wires again.

I don't know that they do any ion implantation with LASERs.
And they don't "embed conductive materials", they add dopants
to modify the properties of Silicon to make different types of
semiconductors. P & N regions.

I don't recall much use of platinum in semiconductors?

To hold a wafer?
But I've not been keeping up either.

 

you know more about this than i do...I had been on the periphery of
that business.

gold and platinum are common in the business, i dont know if those are
used to make wires or not. I assumed they were .. but are comon in
the business generally.


Phil scott

 

Phil, if it was me, I would simply get the high powered laptop and a
couple solar panels that can more than charge up a spare battery.

I simply can't deal with an underpowered laptop that takes 2 minutes
to rebuild a somewhat complex plastic part when a fast laptop can do
it in 30 seconds or less. That is a total waste of my life. It is
also the reason I will likely get an 8 core Mac Desktop so I can get
those rebuild times down.

I just went through an optimization of a part design and must have
done 100-200 rebuilds as I "fixed" various errors I did first time
around, and added equations to keep features "together", and tried
various esthetic & functional sizes. I probably added 2 hours minimum
to my time on that part to get the design optimized.

Bo

 

thanks... I'm not a MS fan at all, but that platform has most of the
programs i need and use with my clients who are also hooked into
it. so i will probably be stuck with those options.

I should get on a SE group and ask if its geared to dual or quad
core. the special they have on a laptop for it is dual core 2.1
ghz. with a nvideo quad pro (vector graphics card)... so maybe it
takes advantage of 2 cores. (inventor doesnt btw at least the 2008
version doesnt).


Phil scott

 

I use XP Pro with SolidWorks on my MacBook Pro just like I do on my
Dell in native mode on an NTFS partition. No different. I've heard a
SWks rep note running SWks 2008 on one of the virtualization programs
with Vista on a MacBook Pro, but I've never tried that myself, though
I have loaded up XP Pro in Parallels on it for general purpose work.

Both SE & NX are now on Windows, OSX, lInux & BSD if I remember right,
and Macs can run all of those, so I figure I have everything to gain
by sticking with Mac Hardware, in simplicity and lowest overall
hardware cost for me.

If I remember right Intel & Apple are claiming that programming
innovations have been made making programming for multi-core
processors easier of late, so I think all intensive applications will
switch to multi-core support within a couple years.

Bo

 

But how much parallelism is there it the typical CAD
application? The Intel & AMD CPUs already try to use pipelines
& some "what if" parallelism IIRC. Simple math ops don't need
all those millions of junctions.
And if you don't have that what good are more "cores"?

Anybody have a handy list of applications well-suited to
parallel processing? FEA, some image processing, CFD, ...

 

Read Intel's & Apple's comments and reports on multi-core processing.
I've read enough to convince myself they are doing the right thing for
future speeds. An example was a recent "desktop" supercomputer which
Univ of Antwerp put together using 4 high end nVidia video cards where
they used the video card's multiple processors to do crunching work.

gizmodo.com—fastra-desktop-supercomputer-built-with-4-nvidia-9800-gx2-
graphics-cards <http://gizmodo.com/394128/fastra-desktop-supercomputer-
built-with-4-nvidia-9800-gx2-graphics-cards>

Multiple core support is coming. I am not a CPU design guy, but I can
see the worthwhile nature of minimizing power use and scaling up the #
of processors used to suit the application or multiple applications
that are running. FEA is crunching intensive.



Bo

 

yeah, pretty wild stuff but,..

http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/index.html
http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/specs.html

..

 

I simply can't deal with an underpowered laptop that takes 2 minutes
to rebuild a somewhat complex plastic part when a fast laptop can do
it in 30 seconds or less. That is a total waste of my life. It is
also the reason I will likely get an 8 core Mac Desktop so I can get
those rebuild times down.

I think you would be better off getting two slightly faster dual core chips
instead of dual quad cores. You only get a little bit of usefulness out of a
second core on SW rebuilds and I don't think you would get anything useful
out of cores five though nine. (I haven't run any tests on a dual quad core
machine though.)

Jerry Steiger

 

apparently SE does not see an advantage in a quad core as they have
recommended a dual core dell.


Phil scott

 

thanks, its starting to look like a dual core with a high end model of
the Nvidia graphics card.

Phil scott

 

For programs/applcations well-suited to parallelism.

Things well-suited to parallelism.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=FEA+parallelism&btnG=Google+Search

 

"Fortunately, these computations can be carried out in parallel, .."

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=cad+parallelism
Looks like parallelism helps in circuit & LSI design .. but other than
in image/graphics processing for display purposes I don't know that
it's of much help in MCAD work.

 

Perhaps because there are now few single-core boxes being
advertised ..... and your VAR sells Dells?

 

the offer appears to come from seimens its on their web site.. a dual
core machine, but with only an 80 gig hd...and a 15" screen. ( i fill
an 80 gig hd in about a week, and I like a bigger screen, dell is
not offering one, HP has a 17" screen.

I dont like the usb port hard drives, they wear out my usb port..it
gets loose in about a year of heavy portable use.

My guess is that dell is coming out with a 17" screen shortly,
probably better resolution as well, and 240gig hd..or two hard drives
or solid state hard drive..whatever.




Phil scott