Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!nec-gw!netkeeper!news
From: koll@NECAM.tdd.sj.nec.com (Michael Goldman)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 64-bits, How many years?
Message-ID: <1991Mar19.225915.17474@sj.nec.com>
Date: 19 Mar 91 22:59:15 GMT
Sender: news@sj.nec.com
Organization: NEC-AM TDD, San Jose, California
Lines: 27
Nntp-Posting-Host: 131.241.12.43


Back in Feb. '91 bill davidsen posted a comment to the effect that the limits
of trace size, electron size, and photon size would mean 64 bits address
size would be all we'd ever need - because we couldn't use any more than that.
Others commented about the need for large virtual spaces but this is to mention
some ways around the limits.

I read sometime in the last 6 months that a research group (AT&T or one of
the other giga-companies) was working on using the energy state of the
electrons of an atom as a way of storing information.

I.e., since an electron can be at any of a large number of energy levels, which
can be induced by sending a photon to the electron, then the energy level of
the valence electrons would be one-to-one mappable to numbers.  So, if one
atom could have 8 easily manipulated energy states, two atoms could represent
numbers 0-63, 4 atoms could represent (8 * 8 * 8 * 8) 0-4095, etc.

One could also include the enegrgy state of the nucleus, or the spin state
of the electron or nucleus, but I haven't heard of anyone working on that
angle.  Signal transmission could be just the appropriate-energy photon
traveling in free-space.  With the resulting density of components, it
would be practical to add all the functions of a CPU to each word.  The
ultimate in massive parallelism.

Possibly, this is the direction neural nets are going towards.

	("Say buddy, can you paradigm?")