The Race to Build a Perfect Computer Chip

Digital activity uses a huge amount of electricity with semiconductors near the limit of their efficiency. Now scientists are racing to perfect new chips that use much less power and handle much more data. 

#thespark #technology #green
--------

QuickTake Originals is Bloomberg's official premium video channel. We bring you insights and analysis from business, science, and technology experts who are shaping our future. We’re home to Hello World, Giant Leap, Storylines, and the series powering CityLab, Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg Green, and much more.

Subscribe for business news, but not as you've known it: exclusive interviews, fascinating profiles, data-driven analysis, and the latest in tech innovation from around the world.

Visit our partner channel QuickTake News for breaking global news and insight in an instant.

[firstnamelastname]

0:00 The importance of developing low-energy computer chips
4:12 Carbon Nanotube Transistors
11:07 Photonics Chips
15:26 Neuromorphic Computing
24:47 Conclusion

[adrielamadi]

I'm a computer scientist specialized in software development but this made me appreciate the hardware side of things. It's really inspiring

[freddoflintstono]

From my perspective this was one of the most interesting quicktakes I've seen. Well assembled and presented.

[thinktoomuchb]

I'd heard of these technologies to varying degrees, but this piece on the current progress of all of them was informative and fascinating. Thank you!

[nayeb]

This just renewed my interest in engineering, truly an inspiring documentary.

[djayjp]

Still a lot better than delivering physical goods (eg Blockbuster vs streaming). I'm sure the former uses more than 100x as much energy.

[kayakMike]

The greatest enemy of a wonderful technological breakthrough is the advanced technology that works well enough.

[shivangsingh]

Just want to thank the team of Bloomberg Quicktake for making these really high quality content for us 🙏🏻♥️

[mdaverde]

What a time to be alive.

This is obviously exciting work but the skepticism in me assumes that once vendors see that they can do more with less, they'll just do more and so the cycle continues. What is also brutally hard about this work to take full effect is the next layer above this needs to also change to take advantage of these performance/energy gains (the firmware, instruction sets, the algorithms, programming languages and so on). Over the long term though, I'm optimistic of this shift

[AlanTheBeast]

I heat my house with electricity for nearly 6 months per year. Therefore 100% of electronics use in the house is 0 energy consuming during that time.
Data centres should be located where there is a need for heating water or other materials. Thus all of the heat can be dumped in the early part of the manufacturing process.

[CoreyChambersLA]

The atom is not the limit to size reduction. Subatomic particles can perform the same functions, better, cheaper and faster.

[hgbugalou]

Software development is also important and is rarely considered in these type of scenarios pertaining to compute efficiency and carbon output. Today's developers are writing bloated inefficient code using high level languages that just add even more overhead. This comes out as wasted CPU/GPU/DPU cycles and thus wasted energy. To some degree the increase in power of the hardware has caused this as before developers had to be much more diligent about writing lean code.

[trolly]

Can confirm we are running out of chips, the chip-to-air ratio changed from 50-50 to 35-65. Trying times indeed. The bag itself is worth more than the chips inside now.

[siddhantjain]

Lithography "nm" these days doesn't really means exact no. Ie 5nm doesn't actually mean 5nm manufacturing process

[edeneden]

I really like the jumps between the founders and the skeptic guy

[omid_saedi]

Such an awesome content that you produce. It has something to teach nearly anybody at any level of knowledge regarding the problem.

[johnsavard]

We've already made amazing strides in the power efficiency of computers. An IBM 360/195, with cache and out-of-order execution, like most modern computers, used much more power. And go back to the days when computers used vacuum tubes instead of transistors, and their power consumption compared to the work they could do was much higher.

[ojhuk]

Photonics are the future. I've been blown away with the ways they are devising to build logic gates that function by altering photons on a quantum level. Light based computers have been a mainstay in Science Fiction for a long time now and it's amazing to see actual real-world advances with practical applications being made.

[hyperteleXii]

This new chip sounds like a pathfinding co-processor to my game developer ears. Navigating in real-time an order of magnitude more agents in a dynamic world would revolutionize game development. Everybody's stuck on pathfinding. We're still using algorithms from the 1960s.

[pterandon]

Superb presentation. Both “pop culture” exposure, and real technical info for experts