This new transistor from China might end silicon’s reign and turn your next laptop into a speed demon
China has begun mass production of next-generation processors based on molybdenum disulfide instead of traditional silicon semiconductors1. According to Professor Li Hongge's team at Beihang University, these chips merge binary and stochastic logic to achieve better fault tolerance and power efficiency for applications like touch displays and flight systems2.
The breakthrough came through developing a Hybrid Stochastic Number (HSN) system that combines traditional binary with probability-based numbers2. This innovation helps overcome two major challenges in chip technology - the power wall from binary systems' high energy consumption, and the architecture wall that makes new non-silicon chips difficult to integrate with conventional systems2.
Footnotes
https://www.techradar.com/pro/chinese-researchers-develop-silicon-free-transistor-technology-claimed-to-be-fastest-and-most-efficient-ever-heres-what-we-knowOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml
Won't make any difference if you are still on windows
they'll find a way for telemetry to use half of it and the start menu another quarter
now theyll rewrite the right click menu AND windows explorer in react
Rewrite entire os to be an electron app
Call it reactOS.
😂
Wom't make a difference with any current OS, none of those would work with the new arquitecture, way different from the current one. One thing is the new hardware and another is the current lack of any soft or OS for it. Not even DOOM would run in it. Maybe in one or two years it would make sense to change your PC.
Another alternative to silice are diamonds, there the chips are with the same arquitecture as those from silice, but with the advantage that they support much more heat to the point that they don't even need refrigeration, apart the electric apabilities of diamond is way better as those from silice, that permits a way higher speed and stability. The price isn't much higher as the one from normal chips with sythetic diamonds. They are already in use, even with manufactories in Spain.
That's not a diamond transistor company. They are making diamond wafers to mount to traditional silicon. It's a heatsink.
Here's a good overview of the current state of the art in diamond transistor manufacturing.
https://youtu.be/NLmd5vL0zmk
New materials doesn't mean new architecture. They can build RISC-V or ARM chips with that.
And with Trump in charge he will ban these for America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust
silicon – 28.2% of earth's crust; 7,200,000 tonnes extracted per year
bismuth – 0.00000085% of earth's crust; 10,200 tonnes extracted per year
doesn't it say "molybdenum disulfide" in the text?
molybdenum - 1.2 ppm (0.00012%); 227,000 tonnes extracted per year
The techradar text says bismuth; the azernews.az text says molybdenum
Industrial diamonds made with almost everything which contains Carbon.
And yet Pepto Bismol is found in huge quantities on every drugstore shelf in the world. How will they ever find enough?? 😂
Silicon is used for way more than just chips though, I'd be surprised if it's more than a percent
Bismuth oxyselenide? You mean it can cure both indigestion and get rid of dandruff‽
No, don't eat the rocks, we're trying to make them think!
Take two micro-processors into the shower?
I'm all for overthrowing the monarchy but my laptop is already full of demons but I do not want them to have a drug problem too that's be unhealthy I hear
Um actually even smooth water pipes have a lot of tubulance since all materials aren't perfectly smooth so the edges of the pipe have a lot of turbulance which dramatically slows down the water from the theoretical maximum.
Marx never considered water pipes aren't perfectly smooth
I went on a shinkansen recently. It was really cool.
If the Party says the pipes are smooth, the pipes are smooth.
Now I wonder what would happen if you coated together a super hydrophobic layer.
dang I never thought of that. I always assumed silicon was basicly the end, except for quantum computers which aren't very useful for most computing.
Never assume something is the end. There is always something better. It is just one breakthrough away.
—me encouraging our locksmith after we've accidentally triggered the prison alarm
Does it run Crysis though?
ONLY GAMERS WILL UNDERSTAND
so, if i understand this correctly, it can do stuff like fast and cheap imprecise arithmetic of floating point numbers by doing something like converting the signal to a continuous (non-binary) voltage, then doing some analogous circuitry, then converting the signal back to digital?
It seems to be an AI accelerator. Without reading the source, to me seems that that's the game. Interesting.
yeah because AI does a lot of floating-point calculations, and precision is famously not very important there (i.e. google replaced all floating point numbers in their AI models with 8-bit precision fixed-point numbers and the performance is just as good).
Well good to know the chips won't stick to anything since they're made out of anti-seize grease.
Sounds like total incompatibility. It will take decades before we could even think about incorporating non binary based systems into our workflow.
I don't think decades, but some years for sure.