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From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 64 bits
Message-ID: <2429@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 16 Aug 90 17:54:39 GMT
References: <5539@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <13285@yunexus.YorkU.CA> <30728@super.ORG> <13667@cbmvax.commodore.com> <40644@mips.mips.COM> <1990Aug8.042631.7093@nlm.nih.gov> <1990Aug8.215735.4197@zoo.toronto.edu> <46173@ism780c.isc.com> <9660@ganymede.inmos.co.uk>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 36

In article <9660@ganymede.inmos.co.uk> stevem@inmos.co.uk (Steve Maudsley) writes:

| 	2. With a judicious use of imagination, there are now a sufficient set
| 	  of techniques availible to produce 1GBit monolithic DRAMs in 2000.
|           These chips will be only about twice as large as current generation
| 	  DRAMs and that only to get the signal wires out.

  If this comes to pass, we will probably see a trend away from the use
of chips with 1 bit datapath. The possibility of going 4 or 8 bytes wide
gives a useful size memory system on a chip. I have speculated before
that when this happens you will see ECC on the memory chip, since it can
be at least as fast as off chip, and requires a lot fewer support chips
and traces. Remember that the most expensive real estate on earth is the
square inches on a PC board.

  You could also postulate that as sizes of gates go down, at some point
static memory starts to look good again, if only because the capacitors
don't shrink as fast as the gates. Poof! There goes all that refresh
circuitry.

  Old people (like me) can remember the traditional tube radio with five
tubes. Now how about the five chip workstation:

	CPU:	32 or 64 bit, 2MB cache, FPU
	Memory:	32MB, error signals out are {soft,hard} error
	i/o:	16S+2P, SCSI, ethernet, keyboard, mouse
	video:	4k x 3k x {15,18} bits, with NTSC i/o and some DSP
		(yes, I think the PC 4:3 aspect ration will be used)

  Looks like only four chips. in 15 years I'm sure that the displays up
to 14" will be some kind of solid state thing, like microLED matrix or
something. I'm a lot less sure about 10 years. Let's call that the fifth
chip, and substitute a really good color LCD until then.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
       "This is your PC. This is your PC on OS/2. Any questions?"