THE CHIPPED DIAMOND

Purely by chance and I do not know how but I came across a little article about the future of the silicon, or not so silicon any more, processor.

I was looking up the history of the humble Marshmallow as I have been thinking about it and it must be named after a plant. I wanted to know how and why, lol. I have a pack of Mega Mashmallows right next to me, I wont get into the incident with The Bag Police at the Tescos in Enfield, lol.

Long story short I am eating them as I got into vaping and was introduced to The Marshmallow Man flavour by Joshua at the local London Vape Co. So I was thinking of Marshmallows, lol.

I miss my days from Middlesex University when we used to speak in great depth how both CPUs and GPUs were made. It was sixteen years ago, JESUS, and even back then we knew that as the lithography of microchips got smaller there would be problems.

It was commonly known that due to the impurities of the Silicon itself that getting it down towards a certain point would be hard and its limit was theorised at around 10nm, or nanometres.

In an exact play through of those predicted difficulties CPUs and GPUs have taken longer this time around to go from 28nm to 16nm.

This is the reason why in the past I have been critical of computer tech journalists going nuts over a GPU card that squeezes a tiny bit more ability from it for astronomical amounts of money.

Some companies had the resources to get there somewhat sooner than the others. Before long the materials of Silicon Carbide and Gallium Nitride become commonly used and the transistors themselves had to change.

Now for a very ... VERY long time I have not kept abreast of these developments and I do not have access to a copy of New Scientist every time it s published, as we did at university.

So as I started out this post saying ... I happened across this blog called Chemical & Engineering News where a journalist is speaking to a man carrying diamonds. Not a deal, smuggler or even blood diamonds as these diamonds are grown. On a wafer, or we getting there yet?

It seems a company is keen on using grown diamonds to put across an idea. An idea that involves growing diamond on top of silicon because of its vastly superior thermal conductivity which is 22 times greater than silicon. He believes that eventually grown diamond will replace silicon altogether.

That is a truly bold and astonishing claim!

What with this diamond microprocessor and graphene it seems the very common substance that makes up all living things and commonly abundant, carbon, has some very, very startling qualities.

Sitting there right under our noses this whole time and we did not think to look!

I only hope that the fact that the element of carbon can become graphene is certain instances that it stands to reason that other elements may all have their own situations where there qualities and abilities change radically?

Why you don't think there is just one magical element in in the periodic toolbox, do you?

I wonder what will be first in this instance, a GPU or a CPU?

He himself thinks something along the lines of a Pentium CPU in a five year period? Interesting.

http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i20/diamond-power-future-electronics.html