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1月27日 下一个十年的信息技术：硬件摩尔定律提出40多年，有人预测半导体技术将在未来几年达到极限——半导体元器件缩小到只有几个纳米的时候物理和化学性状会发生变化，其功能就会变得不稳定。操作系统方面，微软的windows系列似乎也已被挖尽潜力——vista臃肿无比，功能上却并无特别突破。延续多年的wintel轮番升级大赛有偃旗息鼓的趋势。更重要的是，更多更快的信息流对个人和企业是否意味着更多价值呢？未必如此。那么，90年代后半期兴起的“信息革命”要落下帷幕了么？
以上其实提到了两方面的问题：从信息技术的供给方面，期待突破半导体极限的技术出现；从需求方面，我们需要找到“更大更快”的巨量信息流的用武之地——当然不能只是为了多传几部高质量的电影。
带着这样的疑问，结合最近的新闻旧闻，我所找到的答案的轮廓如下：
供给方面
1. IBM金盆洗手个人电脑业务之后，其实把目光投向了下一代的计算机技术——云计算。它在业界强调了多年，未来“computing”的关键不在于PC的预算速度，而在于未来处于高速网络核心的platform——“云”——的计算能力。个人和企业用户将借此获得动态的几乎是不限量的计算能力。个人电脑终端的主要角色将只是作为输入和联网工具而已。说句题外话，每个产业国际巨头眼力和影响力确实不是一般，IBM卖PC业务跟当年日本家电企业卖CRT彩电生产线一样，乍一看是老巨头活力不足，竞争不过发展中国家低成本的后来竞争者，可是后来的竞争者笑了没几年就笑不出来了——眼下PC过个十年就落伍了，CRT买火了几年人家液晶电视是主流了。看一本讲日本产业竞争的书说，人家的家电巨头们90年代初就规划了10年后的液晶电视、蓝光DVD等技术，然后不动声色假装金盆洗手退出江湖，把手里的旧生产线高价卖给发展中国家，转身就开了他的新生产线做液晶做高清。
2. 英特尔在已有技术上做改进——改进芯片微观架构，改指令集，改算法——以Nehalem为代表，这些就不说了，反正还够它继续折腾升级几年。真正的下一代技术，去年年底在英特尔的实验室里已经做出了原型，也就是“photonic integrated chips”光子集成芯片。
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the world first silicon modulator that encodes optical data at 40 Gbps or 40 billion bits per second. Today, I would like to share with you a silicon photonic integrated chip (PIC) that is capable of transmitting data at an aggregate data rate of 200 Gbps. Such an achievement represents a technical milestone towards the goal of realizing a single optical chip with terabits per second data transmission capability for future tera-scale computing. As you may know, to fully exploit the computing power of multi-core and many-core computers, there is a need of high-speed and high-capacity communication network that can manage enormous data transport among the cores and memories. For high-performance computing, terabits per second transceivers may be needed in the foreseeable future. To achieve such a data rate, one needs to adopt various technologies such as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), time division multiplexing (TDM), spatial division multiplexing (SDM), and their combinations. For example, WDM technology has been successfully used in today’s optical fiber communication systems. So far these optical transmission systems have been usually constructed with discrete components such as laser, modulator, detector, and multiplexer, filter, and so on. Although such an approach has been proved to deliver high performance, it is not only bulky but also expensive. Photonic integration is considered to provide a cost-effective solution for high-speed high data rate optical communication for future optical interconnects in computing industry. With monolithic integration of various photonic components on a single substrate, the resulting PIC would have much smaller footprint and be more cost effective because of less demanding on packaging and testing in the PIC as compared to the discrete component solutions. Because the CMOS electronics manufacturing infrastructures and processing technologies can be directly applied to photonics fabrication, silicon based PIC is particularly attractive for the future optical interconnect (I/O) applications. 所以，可预见的未来，CPU的运算能力还是可能出现突破性的提高。所以又说句题外话，哪天英特尔开始卖它的纳米级生产线的时候，发展中国家厂商们可要想清楚了，同样的套不能老去钻。同样的钱宁可去买技术，然后自己消化吸收，再搞研发。
需求方面
1. 电子商务；
2. 基于数据分析的企业管理和决策；
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The demand for people to be connected globally, to do business transparently, and to take computing to new frontiers, combined with the proliferation of smart devices and connected objects, will generate massive amounts of data. Turning that data into insight creates the opportunity to make organizations, industries and our world more intelligent and dynamic.
3. 全国性医疗信息网络；这一点几乎是美国科技经济智囊的共识——既是通过大规模投资缓解当前经济困境的良方，又奠定美国未来医疗、信息、相关服务业产业全球竞争优势的基础。
可见“信息革命”还远未结束，基于更高速的互联网和更强大的数据运算能力的信息技术将推动企业组织管理、消费、医疗、教育以及娱乐等等方面的重大进步。稍带些科幻色彩地说，正在发展中的pattern recognition等人工智能技术，将进一步提高海量信息的处理能力，未来信息技术对生产率进步的影响可以说是决定性的。是以深处经济危机中的美国各个产业，在出于谷底的2009年，仍然会将信息技术投资增加1.6%，这种投资显然是战略性的。 评论 (1)
引用通告此日志的引用通告 URL 是： http://nestlefrank.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!A00E888923076072!793.trak 引用此项的网络日志
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