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On 01/12/2010 11:01 PM, D103 wrote:
> This may be of little consolation now, but maybe in 20 years or so...
>
> http://www.tech-faq.com/dna-computer.html
>
> Imagine a computer with a CPU about the size of a coin, capable of 66 Gigaflops
> and having 700 Terabytes internal memory AND a power consumption of ~
> 0.0000000001 watts (minus the screen and interface devices, of course).
>
> That should speed up rendering!
While I'm not disputing the factual content of your statement, the
article linked to is... well, essentially it's dumbed down so much that
they might as well be talking about computers powered by Pixie Dust.
"[T]here is a limitation to how small, fast and compact silicon computer
chips can be. DNA computers show promise because they do not have the
limitations of silicon-based chips."
O RLY?
"For one, DNA based chip manufacturers will always have an ample supply
of raw materials as DNA exists in all living things; this means
generally lower overhead costs."
And you understand that silicon chips are MADE OF SAND, right? You know,
as in "worthless as sand"? Given planet Earth's gross elemental
composition (60.2% silica, 15.2% alumina, >5% everything else), I
suspect that silicon is rather more abundant than DNA. And let us not
even get into the fact that DNA for computers would be utterly different
in sequence to DNA from living organisms.
It's like saying "people all over the world have windows made of glass,
therefore we can easily make silicon chips". The stuff in a modern IC
isn't very much like window glass.
"Secondly, the DNA chip manufacture does not produce toxic by-products."
Riiight. So because the end product is DNA, a molecule that already
exists in nature, therefore you can produce it with no toxic by-products?
And the DNA itself wouldn't be toxic, no?
"Last but not the least, DNA computers will be much smaller than
silicon-based computers as one pound of DNA chips can hold all the
information stored in all the computers in the world."
Current computers are much, much larger than strictly necessary mainly
due to issues of heat dissipation. You can already make RAM chips that
hold absurd quantities of information; it's just that they tend to melt
when you switch them on.
Besides, just because a strand of DNA can /store/ a lot of information,
it does not necessarily follow that you can build a working
/computational device/ which is only slightly larger.
"a DNA computer the size of a teardrop will be more powerful than
today's most powerful supercomputer."
Possibly. But if you want it to do something /useful/, the teardrop by
itself won't be much help. You still need I/O devices, for example.
"The capacity to perform parallel calculations, much more trillions of
parallel calculations, is something silicon-based computers are not able
to do."
I beg to differ. It would be more accurate to say that nobody has come
up with a way of structuring computer programs as trillions of
independent steps. We could totally build really parallel silicon chips.
For example, recent GPU designs involve executing several hundred
computations in parallel. There's no particular reason why you can't
scale that up to thousands or millions - it's just that the extra R&D
work probably wouldn't pay off in extra sales, because the software to
utilise that much parallelism is lacking.
"In the current technology of logic gates, binary codes from the silicon
transistors are converted into instructions that can be carried out by
the computer."
This is a highly questionable and very muddled statement. It's hard to
read something like this and continue to believe that the writer has any
clue what they're talking about.
"though it may be very fast in providing possible answers, narrowing
these answers down still takes days."
This rather suggests that the operation of a DNA computer is
non-deterministic (and hence, applicable to a much smaller set of
problems than a Turing-complete machine).
I won't hold my breath for this happening any time soon. :-P
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