Dear Science and technology friends,

Using DNA To Build DRAMsPosted by Hemos on Wednesday February 19, @08:35AM
from the make-them-tiny dept.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=18308014
SailorBob writes "A research team at the University of Minnesota has
demonstrated a technique using DNA crystals to build 20 angstrom 1 bit single
electron memory cells. The researchers claim that this technique could be used
to build memory with a 10 trillion bits/cm2 density, which would mean a 6.4
Terabit DRAM."

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3644254
Is the new Cell chip really as revolutionary as its proponents claim?

ANALOGIES are often drawn between the fields of computer science and biology.
The information-processing abilities of DNA are a form of natural molecular
computing, and computer viruses leap from machine to machine in ways reminiscent
of their disease-causing namesakes. At the International Solid-State Circuits
Conference in San Francisco this week, a trio of mighty information-technology
firms-Sony, Toshiba and IBM-pushed the analogy a little further. They unveiled a
much anticipated new computer chip, four years in the making, the very name of
which is a biological metaphor: the Cell.

As its name suggests, the Cell chip is designed to be used in large numbers to
do things that today's computers, most of which are primitive machines akin to
unicellular life-forms, cannot. Each Cell has as its "nucleus" a microprocessor
based on IBM's POWER architecture. This is the family of chips found inside
Apple's Power Mac G5 computers and IBM's powerful business machines. The Cell's
"cytoplasm" consists of eight "synergistic processing elements". These are
independent processors that have a deliberately minimalist design in order,
paradoxically, to maximise their performance.

A program running on a Cell consists of small chunks, each of which contains
both programming instructions and associated data. These chunks can be assigned
by the nucleus to particular synergistic processors inside its own Cell or, if
it is deemed faster to do so, sent to another Cell instead. Software chunks
running on one Cell can talk to chunks running on other Cells, and all have
access to a shared main memory. Since chunks of software are able to roam around
looking for the best place to be processed, the performance of a Cell-based
machine can be increased by adding more Cells, or by connecting several
Cell-based machines together.

All of this means that programs designed to run on Cell-based architecture
should be able to fly along at blistering speeds-and will run ever faster as
more Cells are made available. The prototype Cell being discussed this week runs
at 256 gigaflops (a flop-one "floating-point" operation per second-is a measure
of how fast a processor can perform the individual operations of digital
arithmetic that all computing ultimately boils down to). A speed of 256
gigaflops is around ten times the performance of the chips found in the fastest
desktop PCs today; the Cell is thus widely referred to as a "supercomputer on a
chip", which is an exaggeration, but not much of one. On the top500.org list of
the world's fastest computers, the bottom-ranked machine has a performance of
851 gigaflops. A machine based on only four Cell chips would easily outrank
this.




Hard cell
If you believe the hype, all this has other chipmakers-notably Intel, whose
Pentium series is the market leader-quaking in their boots. No doubt they are
nervous. After all Andy Grove, one of Intel's founders, called his most famous
book "Only the Paranoid Survive". But it is not yet clear that Cell will sweep
all before it. The reason is that existing programs have not been designed in
the chunky way required if they are to run on Cell-based machines-and rewriting
them would be a monumental task.

For the moment, that will not worry Cell's designers because the kinds of things
Cell chips are intended to be used for require specially designed software
anyway. Cell chips are well suited to processing streams of video and sound, and
for modelling the complex three-dimensional worlds of video games, so Cell's
debut will be in Sony's next-generation games console, the PlayStation 3, which
is expected to contain four of the beasts. Cell chips will also be ideal for use
inside consumer-electronics devices such as digital video-recorders and
high-definition televisions. Both Sony and Toshiba plan to use Cell chips in
such products. For its part, IBM is talking up the Cell's potential to power
supercomputers, the fastest of which, IBM's Blue Gene/L, consists of thousands
of special chips that are, in many ways, more primitive versions of Cell. Using
Cell chips instead would not, therefore, be a big stretch. And supercomputer
programmers, like video-game designers, do not mind learning to program an
entirely new machine provided it delivers the performance they are seeking.

If Cell did eventually break out of these specialist applications and into
general-purpose computers, Intel would have every right to be paranoid. But
Kevin Krewell, the editor of Microprocessor Report, an industry journal, sounds
a note of caution. The Cell is too power-hungry for handheld devices, and it
would need to have its mathematical functions tweaked to be really suitable for
use in supercomputers. The Cell is impressive, but, in Mr Krewell's view, "it is
no panacea for all those market segments". Similar claims to those now being
made for Cell were made in the past about the Sony/Toshiba chip called the
Emotion Engine, which lies at the heart of the PlayStation 2. This was also
supposed to be suitable for non-gaming uses. Yet the idea went nowhere, and the
company set up by Toshiba to promote other uses of the Emotion Engine was closed
down.

Extravagant claims were also made about the RISC, POWER and Transmeta
architectures, notes Dean McCarron, a chip analyst at Mercury Research in
Scottsdale, Arizona. These once-novel methods of chip design have done
respectably in specialist applications, but have not dethroned Intel as it was
suggested they might when they were launched. Yet both Mr McCarron and Mr
Krewell acknowledge that things could be different this time. As Mr McCarron
puts it, there are "more ingredients for success present than on previous
attempts". Intel was able to see off earlier pretenders to its throne by
increasing the performance of its Pentium chips, and by exploiting its economies
of scale as market leader. But in this case, the performance gap looks
insuperable, and Sony, Toshiba and IBM plan to exploit economies of scale of
their own.

Quite how revolutionary the Cell chip will turn out to be, then, remains to be
seen. And though it may not be an Intel killer, it could prevent that firm from
extending its dominance of the desktop into the living room.
Consumer-electronics devices, unlike desktop PCs, do not have to be compatible
with existing software. In that sense, the Cell does pose a threat to Intel,
which regards the "digital home" as a promising area for future growth. Stand
by, therefore, for another round of creative destruction in the field of
information technology. And no matter what the Cell does to the broader
computer-industry landscape, the virtual game-vistas it will conjure up are
certain to look fantastic.

From Yours : Dr. BHUDIA.- Science Group Of INDIA.

President:"Kutch Science Foundation".
Founder :"Kutch Amateurs Astronomers Club - Bhuj - Kutch".
Life Member:"kutch Itihaas Parishad".

kutchscience@..., kutchscience@...,

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http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/venustransit_2004/



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