Billions and Billions of Processors

Last night, I attended an open house in Menlo Park at the new digs of the Foresight Institute, a nanotech think tank founded in 1986 to further the cause of nanotechnology. The Foresight Institute was created by K. Eric Drexler, who brought nanotechnology into the public light with his book, Engines of Creation, published in 1987. I remember reading Drexler’s book during a plane flight in the late 1980s. I also remember being stunned by the raw power and promise of nanotech. Today, nanotech still offers a lot of promise, and a few real products.

However, the image appearing on the Foresight Institute’s home page stopped me cold yesterday. It shows an artist’s conception of a desktop nanofactory building a white block about the size of a Rubik’s cube. The caption for the image mentions that the white block could contain, for example, one billion processors.

At Tensilica today, (and in our book Engineering the Complex SOC) we’re concerned with harnessing tens or hundreds of processors on an SOC. The average Tensilica customer uses 6 processors per chip and we have one client, Cisco, which has put close to 200 processors on one chip. That’s today.

A billion processors sort of approximate the processing power of all the computers currently attached to the Internet. In the volume of a baseball. That’s tomorrow.

We don’t yet know how to master the chaotic energy of a billion processors. However, the dreams of the people working in nanotechnology give us fair warning that we need to start thinking seriously about how to harness such complexity.