Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Thursday 3 May 2007, 9:43 AM
Am I mad, in a coma, or have I gone back in time?
Something has gone wrong with reality, First, the Economist - the Economist! - publishes a special report on the future of telecommunications, which includes an introduction that says the microprocessor was invented in 1958 and helped replace the coils in radios, and now this lands in my inbox from Marketwatch:
" Microprocessors are composed of tiny copper electrical wires running over and through silicon chips. The wires serve as transistors, which generate heat as they turn on and off executing binary computing instructions, and together form an integrated circuit. The silicon, meanwhile, helps conduct the heat away from the wires. [...]
The challenge to generate less heat and draw it away from the copper wires more efficiently has been a major research focus at IBM and rival chip makers such as Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. for more than a decade.
That challenge has gotten tougher as companies make ever more-powerful chips by piling on more wires. Now, with nanotechnology the use of tools to manipulate materials at the level of individual atoms or molecules IBM has pioneered a new way to conduct heat away from the wire transistors.
In the new method, IBM researchers coated a mixture of two polymers over the top of a silicon wafer. The two types of molecules in the coating, which were created from scratch by the scientists using component chemicals, then assembled themselves into a thin film pocked with evenly-spaced holes that contain no air. These vacuum spaces, sized 20 nanometers across and spaced 40 nanometers apart, act like molecule-sized versions of the vacuum tubes that once helped insulate mainframe computers and televisions."
In the name of Turing - STOP already! People complain that Wikipedia isn't a reliable source of information and that it will damage the quality of knowledge. Faced with stonking great slabs of lackwittery like those - in organs who want to maintain reputations for accuracy - all one can hope is that the writers spend one, maybe two, minutes in Wikipedia. A few errors of emphasis are greatly to be preferred to rancid elephant slobber like those above.
For the record: the microprocessor was invented in 1971. The integrated circuit - of which microprocessors are but one example only - was invented in 1958 (both dates are arguable but generally accepted). Integrated circuits have practically _never_ replaced the coils in radios: rather importantly, inductors have been one of the two classes of component that have proved the most difficult to economically integrate.
As for the copper wires and tiny insulating voids helping to conduct heat - I'm at a loss here, on so many levels, but the writer appears to be confusing vacuum tubes with thermos flasks. Thermos flasks did have a big role to play in the design, construction and operation of early mainframes, but only to keep the coffee hot (and in certain cases, the martinis cold) of the wayward souls charged with such tasks. Vacuum tubes got very hot indeed, and created their very own heat crises for designers long before Gordon Moore's contributions to the air conditioner industry.
Sheesh.
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