Not Anytime Soon . . .

Ionic Cooling

Researchers at Purdue have found that ions cool computer chips better than regular old atoms.

Now all they have to do is scale it down by a factor of a thousand and make it sturdy enough to work commercially. They think this will take three years, and techie researchers have been known to be a little optimistic on their forecasts.:)

Certainly not against anything that makes air work better, and this could become really, really important in 2011 or so when the PC-in-your-pocket movement should be in full swing, but that’s about when it will.

Multithreading On the Fly

After a few mumbled leaks about this in the past, AMD came out of the closet with the concept and gave it a name: Light-Weight Profiling (LWP).

What LWP appears to do is provide a hardware basis for keeping track and managing what all those nice little multiple threads are doing to make them play well with each other. This is a very good idea because trying to do this in software is a big reason why software developers are tearing their hair out trying to write programs for boxes like the PS3.

Unfortunately for both AMD and programmers’ hair, this is something else that isn’t showing up any time soon. LWP requires a hardware extension to the x86 protocol, and not even AMD plans to support it in K10 or K11. This is more “let’s talk about this,” and as 802.11n has demonstrated, geeks can talk for a long, long time about a standard.

Again, a good idea, one can hardly be against it. The problem is we can’t fast-forward to 2011 for it.

Ed


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