Scientists Find Fundamental Maximum Limit for Processor Speeds

That's easy, we just throw more possessors into each chip. pretty soon we will have one chip on a motherboard anyhow. Then the chip will just get bigger until your computer is a 50 lb block of silicon with water channels running through it filling the hot water tanks at your house.

It would force a minimum level of cleanliness because your computer would overheat if you haven't taken a shower in a while. (^_^)

We are spoiled anyways with how fast computers have gotten. I am content with the speed of my personal computer. Supercomputers will still take time, and if we reach a limit for that, so be it. But the public has nothing to worry about, unless the rapidly accelerating tech-savvy society becomes so fast-paced that it actually notice nanosecond differences in computing speeds.

Haven't they been predicting the end of Moore's law for 15 years now, not to mention the end of fossil fuels, and the end of mankind due to global warming, or global cooling, or flying cars, or world peace, or world war III, or death by LHC induced black hole.
The press sure loves these predictions. I predict in 75 years we will learn new things about quantum physics that disprove the ramblings of the really smart guy who was probably misquoted in the above article.
Just remember, this time they really, really mean it.

While I do believe that there are limits to physical processes, such as how fast a computer processor can operate, I find that making an accurate prediction for how fast a quantum computer can run to be dubious at best, as we don't even have the technology or know-how to build one yet. I don't claim to be an expert on this subject, but I do know that people can rarely predict the future with any accuracy. There have been many things deemed impossible over the years by educated men of science that are in fact quite possible and relied upon today for modern technology.
To say that computing speed has an upper limit is nothing but the truth; but to try and predict what that limit might be is not an easy task, and any answer to that question should be taken with a grain of salt.

To even say there are limits to computing is without merit.
To say there are limits to computing using known sciences makes more sense. There will be "undiscovered countries" that will change the way we perceive our universe and take us to unlimitled possibilities of achievements we have yet to even imagine. That is if we can survive our current situation long enough to get there.

Computers will keep growing until they build one the size of a planet to work The Question. We already know the answer.

Douglas Adams Rocks

I believe the end of Moore's law maybe earlier than the fundamental technological limits actually reached someday.

Because what drives speed increases is mostly computer games. When the games become really close to the real world someday I doubt general public would want to pay extra for anything faster.

(Actually there are always some scientific problems need super speed but I doubt those would be enough to drive an entire industry further anymore.)

A tachyon based computer would have infinite speed.

@ 7thentity
"A tachyon based computer would have infinite speed."

According to the contemporary and widely accepted understanding of the concept of a particle, tachyon particles are too unstable to be treated as existent. By that theory, faster than light information transmission and causality violation with tachyons are impossible on both grounds: they are non-existent in the first place (by tachyon condensation) and even if they existed they wouldn't be able to transmit information (by Feinberg's analysis). Despite the theoretical arguments against the existence of tachyon particles, experimental searches have been conducted to test the assumption against their existence; however, no experimental evidence for or against the existence of tachyon particles has been found.

McGyver,

There are many fundamental particles that have not yet been detected.

Secondly, what exactly is "time"? or Gravity for that matter. There are too many unknowns in the universe and many times things that have been considered impossible, have been shown to be in fact possible. There is a margin of error with everything. My initial statement is accurate though, I never said that solution to a problem would appear before the question was posed (to the computer). Only that the solution would be apparent immediatly.

heysteve: um hi im new here lol \(^_^)/

"So... what happens when those speeds max out?"

The same thing happening today: more parallel processing.

"There are many fundamental particles that have not yet been detected.

Secondly, what exactly is "time"? or Gravity for that matter. There are too many unknowns in the universe and many times things that have been considered impossible, have been shown to be in fact possible. There is a margin of error with everything. My initial statement is accurate though, I never said that solution to a problem would appear before the question was posed (to the computer). Only that the solution would be apparent immediatly."

@7thentity

My argument isn't that tachyon computers could or couldn't exist, my problem with your statement that "A tachyon based computer would have infinite speed." is that even if a tachyon based computer could be built, it wouldn't have infinite speed.

A tachyon is constrained to the space-like portion of the energy-momentum graph. Therefore, it cannot slow down to subluminal speeds. Even if tachyons were conventional, localizable particles, they would still preserve the basic tenets of causality in special relativity and not allow transmission of information faster than light, contrary to what has been written in many works of science fiction.

For a really good explanation here is an excerpt from a paper by on the Physics FAQ page by Scott I. Chase (skip to the end if the math doesn't interest you):

How about using tachyons to transmit information faster than the speed of light, in violation of Special Relativity? It's worth noting that when one considers the relativistic quantum mechanics of tachyons, the question of whether they "really" go faster than the speed of light becomes much more touchy! In this framework, tachyons are waves that satisfy a wave equation. Let's treat free tachyons of spin zero, for simplicity. We'll set c = 1 to keep things less messy. The wavefunction of a single such tachyon can be expected to satisfy the usual equation for spin-zero particles, the Klein-Gordon equation:

(BOX + m2)phi = 0

where BOX is the D'Alembertian, which in 3+1 dimensions is just

BOX = (d/dt)2 - (d/dx)2 - (d/dy)2 - (d/dz)2.

The difference with tachyons is that m2 is negative, and m is imaginary.

To simplify the math a bit, let's work in 1+1 dimensions, with co-ordinates x and t, so that

BOX = (d/dt)2 - (d/dx)2

Everything we'll say generalizes to the real-world 3+1-dimensional case. Now - regardless of m, any solution is a linear combination, or superposition, of solutions of the form

phi(t,x) = exp(-iEt + ipx)

where E2 - p2 = m2. When m2 is negative there are two essentially different cases. Either |p| >= |E|, in which case E is real and we get solutions that look like waves whose crests move along at the rate |p|/|E| >= 1, i.e., no slower than the speed of light. Or |p| < |E|, in which case E is imaginary and we get solutions that look waves that amplify exponentially as time passes!

We can decide as we please whether or not we want to consider the second sort of solutions. They seem weird, but then the whole business is weird, after all.

1) If we do permit the second sort of solution, we can solve the Klein-Gordon equation with any reasonable initial data - that is, any reasonable values of phi and its first time derivative at t = 0. (For the precise definition of "reasonable", consult your local mathematician.) This is typical of wave equations. And, also typical of wave equations, we can prove the following thing: If the solution phi and its time derivative are zero outside the interval [-L,L] when t = 0, they will be zero outside the interval [-L-|t|, L+|t|] at any time t. In other words, localized disturbances do not spread with speed faster than the speed of light! This seems to go against our notion that tachyons move faster than the speed of light, but it's a mathematical fact, known as "unit propagation velocity".

2) If we don't permit the second sort of solution, we can't solve the Klein-Gordon equation for all reasonable initial data, but only for initial data whose Fourier transforms vanish in the interval [-|m|,|m|]. By the Paley-Wiener theorem this has an odd consequence: it becomes impossible to solve the equation for initial data that vanish outside some interval [-L,L]! In other words, we can no longer "localize" our tachyon in any bounded region in the first place, so it becomes impossible to decide whether or not there is "unit propagation velocity" in the precise sense of part 1). Of course, the crests of the waves exp(-iEt + ipx) move faster than the speed of light, but these waves were never localized in the first place!

The bottom line is that you can't use tachyons to send information faster than the speed of light from one place to another. Doing so would require creating a message encoded some way in a localized tachyon field, and sending it off at superluminal speed toward the intended receiver. But as we have seen you can't have it both ways: localized tachyon disturbances are subluminal and superluminal disturbances are nonlocal.

Cntrl+C, Cntrl+V.

Nice.

We say nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
Time is only a measurement of the cyclical property of a known frequency. There is no time fundamental propery only the present and the present is always in a state of flux. We measure this flux by comparing it to cycles of a standard frequency such as Cesium or the rotation of the Earth. Has anyone ever traveled one fraction of a second in the past or the future? If so how did they get back to this present time.
Future and past only exsist outside of the 3D universe or in our thoughts. We can remember the past and ponder the future but never exist there, only in the present. Our thoughts transcend the physical. Some may even say spiritual.However put they exist without mass or momentum.

^^

Whoa, that's deep man. Seriously, if I wasn't taking a big toke off this 5 foot bong right now, my head would be spinning from what you said.

Deep....

orangeblood,

If all there is is "now", why doesn't everything happen at once? You say there is a "state of flux" which essentially is renaming time. If time is a mental apparatus for explaining the universe, how do particles have duration? Time is a real phenomena, but my question stands, what is it?

I hope this won't mean another 75 years of trashing whole computers just to upgrade one tiny little piece inside.

Hello computer makers, when do you finally come around to introduce the universal "processor-tray" !?

I mean, honestly - isn't this the pink elephant in the board room of all computer makers?

"Learn to Live & Live to Learn"
Alexander von Humboldt

You know, for a while there I forgot that we were talking about the limits of processors. So many good arguements about tachyons (a hypothetical particle from what I can understand). I do agree with the idea that faster-light-transmission isn't viable, but to say that the tachyon can't exist period is in my opinion so wrong. It should read more like "The tachyon can't exist in any observable-by-us-in-our-current-orientation dimension." Hmm, sounds just about right. I love to here others opinions, so feel free to comment.

One thing that is always forgotten is the fact that Man ingenuity is infinite. We may not use silicon but what about dilithium crystals. What about positronic networks, or better yet anti-matter. Last but not least what about using things that all ready moving faster than the speed of light like tachyons. "Impossible is not impossible, impossible has not yet met it's solution which has not be invented".

CT