The greater frequency you try to sap from a semiconductor, the more heat you produce in the process! This was realized long before the 3GHz barrier was reached for consumer microcomputers!

Instead, the trick is to cram more and more independant and interoperative cores on a single chip. There are already 12 and 24 core CPUs on the market (in the server market anyway), with 6 and 8 core CPUs growing in popularity amongst the more hardcore consumers (gamers, mostly).

As Kray once put it: “What would you rather use to plough a field – 1 strong oxen or 1024 chickens?”

My question is, how much speed and storage will one person ever need? I think a petabyte is more than enough for one person to handle every media item you may incur in your lifetime!

Yes, there are limits to how fast an item can move, how high em frequency can go, etc, but that does not automatically mean you can only go up to that level for computing. Three processors can work in tandem to exceed physical limitations in their total output. One processor routes the content and the other two process it, for example. Furthermore, you neglect the theoretical particles and waves that move faster than light, assuming they do exist and can be used. Also, you neglect fields; there is no speed of a field, magnetic, gravitational, or otherwise. The field either exists or does not. If we could learn to send data over a field instead of a wave then there is no physical limitation (and you would always have cell coverage . The problem with this has always been making the connection from the field, which is not physical, thus, not having physical limits, to the object, which is physical, thus having physical limits.

This kind of talk always leads me to quote Nikola Tesla:

“Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe.”

We are nearing that generation where all machinery is powered by the atoms around them, communicate using the gravitational fields they are in, and store their data in super-subatomic lattice structures. Crazy conspiracy theorist stuff ahead: If only the government would stop interfering we might already be there, or at least much closer.

The point is, as a scientist you need to think out of the box, and be willing to challenge the facts of today to prove the facts of tomorrow.

There are exactly 10 types of people in the world — those who understand binary, and those who do not.

8 bits to a byte is arguable. “Byte” is short for “BinarY TErm” and represents the number of bits worked with as a group.

In the old baudot communication standard (documented in an AT&T journal dated September 1920), a byte was 5 bits. But when you added the parity bit at one of the communication layers, it was 6 bits. In yet another communication layer, a stop bit is added making a 7 bit byte.

ASCII is a 7 bit byte standard.

Old IBM computers and others developed back in that time used a standard 9 bit byte — 8 data bits and a parity bit to check the reliability of the data and reduce errors. All core memory and tape backups, etc. used a 9 bit byte. This is why the old tape backup and data storage were called 9-track tapes.

As memory systems became more and more reliable, it has been decided that the parity bit was no longer needed, so the byte gradually dropped from 9-bit to 8-bit.

Today the Standard Byte is 8 bits, but if you are ever reading ancient documentation, don’t assume that a byte is 8 bits.

Andy