A time dilation tool from an anime is discussed for its practical use on Earth; there seem surprisingly few uses and none that will change the world, due to the severe penalties humans would incur while using it, and basic constraints like Amdahl's law limit the scientific uses. A comparison with the position of an Artificial Intelligence such as an emulated human brain seems fair, except most of the time dilation disadvantages do not apply or can be ameliorated and hence any speedups could be quite effectively exploited. I suggest that skeptics of the idea that speedups give advantages are implicitly working off the crippled time dilation tool and not making allowance for the disanalogies.
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Yes, but how much of the work that goes into the next generation is just layout? It doesn't solve all of your chemical or quantum mechanical issues, or fixes your photomasks for the next shrunken generation, etc. If layout were a major factor, we should expect to hear of 'layout farms' or supercomputers or datacenters devoted devoted to the task. I, at least, haven't. (I'm sure Intel has a datacenter or two, but so do many >billion tech multinationals.)
And if layout is just a fraction of the effort like 10%, then Amdahl's law especially applies.
it doesn't give many actual current details, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_lithography implies that as of 2006 designing the photomask for a given chip required ~100 CPU years of processing, and presumably that has only gone up.
Etching a 22nm line with 193nm light is a hard problem, and a lot of the techniques used certainly appear to require huge amounts of processing. It's close to impossible to say how much of a bottle neck this particular step in the process is, but based on how much really knowing what is going on in even just simple... (read more)