Computer Info – August 22, 2001
No Meeting This Week
No meeting this week due to
VACATION. We will be on a tour of Colorado instead of at the Deltona Libaray.
But we will be back the following Wednesday.
Intel
By 2005, Intel expects to have
10GHZ processors and by the year 2007, they plan to have 20GHZ processors
in consumers PCs..
Vastly improved transistors
are a driving force behind tomorrow’s faster CPUs. Iintel has developed
transistors that are almost 10 times faster than the transistors used in
P4 CPUs. Because of the 1.5 trillion on/off switches per second, Intel
has termed these terahertz transistors.
Intel’s new transistors
are extremely small, only 20 nanometers wide as opposed to the 180 nanometer
size of the transistors found in P4 CPUs. You would have to line up 10,000
of the new transistors to equal the width of a human hair. These processors
will be the first to have one billion transistors in a little piece of
silicon the size of your fingernail.
The new transistors are
extremely fast and their small size means they require much less power
than current transistors. These lower voltages will lead to longer battery
life for notebooks, as well as less heat buildup.
Intel will face stiff competition
from AMD and IBM, which are both developing advanced processor technology.
IBM recently announced the successful testing of SiGe (silicon germanium)
transistors running at 210GHz while sipping 50% less power than today’s
transistors. IBM predicts that this could lead to 100GHz processors within
the next two years.
A Few Interesting Web Sites
Ask Me --- This is a useful site where PEOPLE answer your questions.
Or you can browse through answers that they have already provided others.
http://www.askme.com
The Deep Photographic Guide to the Constellations
http://www.allthesky.com/constellations/const.html
The National Weather Service Home Page – This is probably the right
time of the year to be watching our weather.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/
The Christmas Lesson – This one our daughter loved, so we thought we
would pass it along to you.
http://www.ldonline.org/first_person/christmas_lesson.html
Science News about the Sun-Earth Environment
http://www.spaceweather.com/
Weird Mysteries
http://www.europa.com/edge/weird.html