The End of Intel: the Beginning of the Computer

The End of Intel: the Beginning of the Computer

For over thirty years, since the beginning of the computing age, the Gordon Moore's equation for the number of chip transistors doubling every eighteen months has been true (Leyden). However, this equation by its very nature cannot continue on infinitely. Although the size of the transistor has drastically decreased in the past fifty years, it cannot get too much smaller, therefore a computer cannot get much faster. The limits of transistor are becoming more and more apparent within the processor speed of Intel and AMD silicon chips (Moore's Law). One reason that chip speeds now are slower than possible is because of the internal-clock of the computer. The clock organizes all of the operation processing and the memory speeds so the information ends at the same time or the processor completes its task uniformly. The faster a chip can go (Mhz) requires that this clock tick ever and ever faster. With a 1.0 Ghz chip, the clock ticks a billion times a second (Ball). This becomes wasted energy and the internal clock limits the processor. These two problems in modern computing will lead to the eventual disproving of Moore's Law. But are there any new areas of chip design engineering beside the normal silicon chip. In fact, two such designs that could revolutionize the computer industry are multi-threading (Copeland) and asynchronous chip design (Old Tricks). The modern silicon processor cannot keep up with the demands that are placed on it today. With the limit of transistor size approaching as well the clock speed bottleneck increasing, these two new chip designs could completely scrap the old computer industry and recreate it completely new.

The number of transistors for a Pentium 4 processor is about 42,000,000 transistors per chip, and that was beginning in the year 2000 (Moore's Law). Should Moore's Law continue, the number of transistors on a microprocessor would be approaching 1 billion. Skeptics inquire, "Just how is this possible," presenting a valid point. Transistors work by being on or off and consequentially creating a zero or one in mathematical lines of code when electricity is sent to them. There is a gap of electrical insulation that separates the source, the direction from which the charge is coming, and the drain, the direction the charge should empty into or not, depending if the transistor is on or off. If the transistor gets much smaller it will be made up of only a few molecules and atoms, far to small to effectively conduct electricity or light.