CPU Competition Heating Up In 2012? 100
jd writes "2012 promises to be a fun year for hardware geeks, with three new 'Aptiv-class' MIPS64 cores being circulated in soft form, a quad-core ARM A15, a Samsung ARM A9 variant, a seriously beefed-up 8-core Intel Itanium and AMD's mobile processors. There's a mix here of chips actually out, ready to be put on silicon, and in last stages of development. Obviously these are for different users (mobile CPUs don't generally fight for marketshare with Itanium dragsters) but it is still fascinating to see the differences in approach and the different visions of what is important in a modern CPU. Combine this with the news reported earlier on DDR4, and this promises to be a fun year with many new machines likely to appear that are radically different from the last generation. Which leaves just one question — which Linux architecture will be fully updated first?"
Evolutionary! (Score:5, Insightful)
Too many other bottlenecks (Score:5, Insightful)
Small SSDs are cheaper (Score:5, Insightful)
slow crappy Hard Drives (SSD's too expensive)
SSDs aren't too expensive if you don't need to keep your library of videos available at a moment's notice at all times. There exist affordable SSDs that are big enough to hold an operating system, applications, and whatever documents you happen to be working on at a given time.
Re:All that's great but (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you want something with the energy density of thermite
Thermite doesn't have an especially high energy density. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg [wikipedia.org]
Pure aluminium has a moderate energy density. Once you mix in the iron oxide in stochiometric quantities, the energy density goes down by quite a bit (factor of 4). That still puts it as better than any known battery technology, but only by a factor of 2 for zinc air and 5 dor li-poly. All the common fuels have a much higher energy density.
The reason that thermite burns so hot is that the products of combustion have a fairly low specific heat capacity and there is no need to heat up a huge bunch of useless nitrogen (compared to burning fuel in air).
Bottom line is that thermite beats existing battery tech by a wide margin, but falls very far short of common fuels.