(Sorry for the mislaunch earlier, this Netscape Messenger is driving
me up the wall. Due to unfortunate intereference between a MTA
misconfiguration and the local potsmaster I have to temporarily
resort to this festering piece of brokenness.)
Adrian Tymes wrote:
> * Come up with designs for a x86-compatible processor and motherboard -
> not necessarily fast, not necessarily Pentium-compatible (386 should
> be sufficient), but two layers at most - and print it on some plastic
Why? You can build decent CPUs with ~10 k transistors.
> a la the printable PC research at MIT. Emphasis here is that the
Why? Plastic transistors have their niches, but wearable CPUs are
not it. Displays, possible.
> circuit still works even with minor (~ 1 mm) holes and rips.
If you're talking wearable hardware, I'll be very happy with a fannypack
and a decent headset/headup. Sewing stuff into cloth is silly.
> Possibly use insane amounts of parallel processing (since "chip" real
> estate is relatively cheap) to help mitigate speed issues brought on
Chip real estate is not cheap, not in the world I woke up in today.
> by large feature size (at 100 MHz, even light can only travel 3
> meters per cycle, counting all the circuit traces would have to go
> through; if each feature is, say, 2 mm wide, then that's at most
> 1500 gates even if one could put them right next to each other, and
> that's not even accounting for memory latency).
If your transistors are made from plastic, relativistic latency
will be the least of your problems.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:39 MDT