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“There is no limit to the tasks it can perform.” Max Schulaker with Cedric, the first computer in the world to be made entirely of nanotubes
BBC – It’s a new generation for digital devices, maybe, with the production of the first computer built entirely with carbon nanotubes.
The computer, named Cedric is just a “basic prototype”, according to BBC, but it is believed that there is real promise here: it can be made into a smaller, faster and even more efficient computer than the current silicon models we use currently.
Cedric's transistors are built to be immune to imperfection
There have been prophecies that nanotubes will take over from silicon, but no one has been able to build a working nanotube computer.
No one, that is until now, when engineers at Stanford University decided to get round to the issue at hand.
Is Cedric fast? Hilarious question. You could say Cedric is fast, if you were in the 90’s. The thing is, Cedric works using only one bit of information, and can only count to 32. As co-author Max Shulaker says, "In human terms, Cedric can count on his hands and sort the alphabet. But he is, in the full sense of the word, a computer."
However, given enough memory, “there is no limit to the tasks it can perform.”
Even though Cedric only counts to 32 right now, in principle it can count to 32 billion
Let us give a standing ovation to Cedric, soon-to-be ancestor of computers for the future.
Cedric's vital statistics
- 1 bit processor
- Speed: 1 kHz
- 178 transistors
- 10-200 nanotubes per transistor
- 2 billion carbon atoms
- Turing complete
- Multitasking