Wired 11.09: The New Diamond Age - September 2003
Up till recently, the only way to actually make a diamond was to use a diamond shard as a “seed” and build a bunch of small diamond crystals on that seed, and those crystals would be used in industrialized applications such as drill bit tips and radial saw blades. Not so anymore: new ways of creating diamonds that are more perfect than natural diamonds, and for WAY cheaper than DeBeers would want you to know about. DeBeers is about to lose its hold on the diamond market, in another few years. This article and its contents have been the talk of coffee shops and Linux newsgroups/mailing lists/online forums for quite a while now. Think of the implications! Diamond is, being so dense and structured, the perfect heat conductor, being even more effective than gold and silver by several times; and, since you can’t get more clear than a clear diamond, my guess is that in another few years (20, give or take) partially-optical CPUs will come of age. Additionally, since these new ways of manufacture are so much cheaper than buying Earth-mined stones, I think we’ll see the silicon in CPUs, motherboards, and high-performance video cards being replaced with straight carbon, diamond style. Indeed, even heat sink manifolds and, eventually, cases themselves (!) could be diamond with this kind of technology. If this goes according to plan, you could expect to buy an AMD 128-bit chip etched into a diamond plate, and you could mount a diamond heat sink on top of it. With water cooling kits coming into mainstream these days, what with all this excess heat from the latest and greatest chipsets, you’ll want to show off the innards of your system with a clear case—not acrylic, of course, but diamond. Of course, your wife or girlfriend might just ask for a Hope-sized rock for Christmas next year….
Wired News: Turn That PC Into a Supercomputer - 14 October 2003
Speaking of ridiculously souped-up CPUs, how about this? A high-performance, low-power (and, by implication, low-heat!) FPU (Floating-Point Processor) from ClearSpeed Technologies that can do 25 gigaflops! (Flops are a measurement meaning “number of floating-point operations that can be performed per second.” The average AMD Athlon XP chips, from 1700+ to 2200+, run at between 2 and 3 gigaflops!) Basically, if you stack these together on a few PCI cards (and had nothing else taking those slots in your machine), you could have a “Top 500” PC running in your own home! Now, of course, this sort of performance will still be prohibitively expensive to most individual PC enthusiasts, because to outfit your PC to run at 600 gigaflops you would need 24 of these new FPUs, for a grand total of about $25K. Sound like a lot? Consider that most supercomputers these days cost many millions of dollars! Let’s say we give these a few years to come down in price from just over a thousand dollars to three or four hundred. What then? You could buy them mounted on video cards and experience frame rates faster than electrons can shoot onto your CRT or flip the blood of your LCD panel displays. You could buy them mounted within motherboards for servers that could recompile the Linux kernel in a few seconds flat! This is where computing is headed, folks.
Wired 11.11: It’s Wake-Up Time - November 2003
For a couple of years, the drug being marketed by Cephalon as Provigil (modafinil) has sparked inspiration and hope for many a geek. Especially those of us who enjoy being altogether too awake at all times. (Indeed, I’ve mirrored on my “humor” page a UserFriendly comic from last year.) Perhaps the best thing is, it’s not an amphetamine, so you can’t build a tolerance to it and it’s non-habit forming. I’m addicted already with sheer anticipation, ’tis true, but at least there won’t be any withdrawals if I can’t get my hands on any for a while. Ha! With a prediction that it will be available over the counter within a decade, I’m primed and ready. How many study-related problems could be solved, how many boring lectures sat through, how many papers could be written by simply not sleeping? No more pilots falling asleep, no more truck drivers jack-knifing because they’re trying to make an extra buck…. The direst implication could be how this interacts with alcohol. If it sobers one up, great. If it doesn’t—if it just keeps the tolerance higher and higher, like nicotine—then how many more alcohol-related deaths will there be? The guy who can stand can drink; the guy who is conscious and sitting can drink; but the guy whose system has been utterly overcome by the stuff will simply pass out. A passed-out guy on a couch with a BAC of X, whatever X is, poses an infinitely smaller risk to the general community than that same guy, jacked up and drunk, in a car. We shall see how this pans out. Meanwhile, I look forward to writing a few papers with all those extra hours I’m not asleep!
What do you think? Reactions? Questions? Diatribes? What do you think about all this stuff?
