It was already during march in the news, AlphaGo, an AI based on Neural Networks, beat Lee Sedol, a professional Go player, 4:1.

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

The Chinese take over the leadership of the US in supercomputing, the most powerful, homegrown, system is now the Sunway TaihuLight with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 Peta-flops.

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

If we can not shrink the transistor size any further, what other options do we have to increase compute power?

3D packaging

The ITRS report suggest to go into third dimension and build cubic chips. The more layers are build the more integrated cooling will be necessary.

Memory Wall

Currently memory latencies are higher than compute cycles on CPUs, with faster memory tehchniques or higher bandwidth the gap can be closed.

Memristor

The Memristor is an electronic component proposed in 1971. It can be used for non-volatile memory devices and alternative, neuromorphic compute architectures.

Photonics

Using light for computation sounds quite attractive, but the base element, the photonic transistor, has yet to be developed.

Quantum Computing

Really, i do not have a clue how these thingies work, somehow via Quantum Effects like Superposition and Entanglement but people say they are going to rock when they are ready...

Considering so much room for research,
i give +1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Moore's law, the heartbeat of computer evolution, is the observation that every two years the amount of transistors on integrated circuits doubles. Gordon Moore, co founder of Intel, proposed an doubling every year in 1965 and an doubling every two years in 1975.

In practice this results in an doubling of compute power of computer chips every two years.

The doubling of transistor amount is achieved by shrinking their size. The 1970s Intel 8080 chip was clocked with 2 Mhz, had about 6000 transistors and was produced in an 6 Micrometer process. Nowadays processors have billions of transistors and use an 14 or 10 Nanometer process.

But less known is Moore's Second Law, the observation that also the investment costs for the fabrics grow exponentially.

The last ITRS report of 2015 predicts that transistor shrinking will hit such an economic wall in 2021, and alternative techniques have to be used to keep Moore's Law alive.

Considering this news,
i give -1 points for the Singularity to take off.

It is the year 2016 and some Trans-humanists say the Singularity is near.

A event where the technological environment starts to feed its own development in an feedback loop and exceeds human understanding.

The aim of this blog is to observe if the Singularity is going to take off and when.

Have fun.

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SM2078