N3XT: Advanced chips for faster computers 1000x

Researchers have come up with an all new way to revolutionize the standard computer chip that comes inbuilt in all our electronics.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley among others, have invented a new material that could replace the 'silicon' in conventional chips – built in all electronic devices – making the device's processing speed 1,000 times faster.

This means that the new chip made with nano-material could solve complex problems in a fraction of the time our computers take.

 

Silicon Chip – A Resource-Heavy Single-Storey Layout

The standard silicon chips currently used in all electronic devices have one major issue:

The silicon chips are arranged like standalone houses in the suburbs.

This means these chips are single-storeys in which each "house" in the neighbourhood are connected with wires that carry digital data.

The drawback of silicon chips is that the data in these chips travels longer distances and wastes energy, often causing digital traffic jams while processing.

N3XT Chip – Skyscraper Approach is 1000 Times Faster

N3XT chips that are made from carbon nanotube transistors are tiny cylindrical molecules of carbon that efficiently conduct heat and electricity.

The N3XT model splits processors and memory into, say, different 'floors' in a skyscraper.

All those floors are then connected by millions of tiny electronic elevators, called 'vias,' that are used to transport data between chips.

The big advantage of Skyscraper approach – data moves much faster, and more efficiently over shorter distances (vertically) than across a larger area (horizontally) like in current silicon chips.

"When you combine higher speed with lower energy use, N3XT systems outperform conventional approaches by a factor of a thousand," said H. -S. Philip Wong, the Professor, who authored the paper.

Another Advantage of N3XT Over Silicon Chip

Another advantage of Skyscraper chips over Silicon chips is that:

Silicon chip cannot be piled on top of each other like in N3XT chip, because, during fabrication silicon chip gets extremely hot (almost 1,000 degrees centigrade) that ends up damaging the layers below.

Whereas the N3XT chip can be fabricated at much lower temperatures than silicon chip, so it can easily be layered without damaging the stacks below.

It sounds like an entirely different approach to computer memory and, of course, this kind of computing knowledge is new to me. But, it's interesting to know that the approach could bring a macro-level revolution in chip architecture that took place more than a century ago.

You can just check out the original report at Stanford News for more details and let me know what's your take on it.

 

GHCQ opensources its large scale database Software

 

UK's Secretive Spy Agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has open-sourced one of its tools on code-sharing website GitHub for free...

A graph database called 'Gaffer.'

Gaffer, written in Java, is a kind of database that makes it "easy to store large-scale graphs in which the nodes and edges have statistics such as counts, histograms and sketches."

Github is a popular coding website that allows software developers to build their project on a single platform equipped with all the requirements that are gone in the making of a software.

Gaffer and its Functionalities

In short, Gaffer is a framework for creating mass-scale databases, to store and represent data, and is said to be useful for tasks including:

• Allow the creation of graphs with summarised properties within Accumulo with a very less amount of coding.
• Allow flexibility of stats that describe the entities and edges.
• Allow easy addition of nodes and edges.
• Allow quicker retrieval of data on nodes of interest.
• Deal with data of different security levels – all data has a visibility, which is used to restrict who can access data based on their authorizations.
• Support automatic age-off of data.

Gaffer actually uses the Apache Accumulo codebase that was originally open-sourced by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and is released under the Apache 2.0 licence.

 

Why GCHQ Open Sourced its Code?

It's pretty unusual for one of the most secretive intelligence agencies to release computer code online for anyone to use for free.

Because GCHQ is very well known for monitoring communications worldwide and is not at all expected to release its database types open source on GitHub.

However, maybe this GCHQ's move is part of its effort toward becoming friendlier in the hacker community and to attract new talents.

The spy agency also says that it is already started working on Gaffer2, a project the agency aims to take "the best parts of Gaffer... to create a more general purpose graph database system."

What do you think about this GCHQ's move? Feel free to tell us by hitting the comments below.