George Gilder - Gilder Technology Report: The Next Revolution In Chips

» Kirk - The Next Revolution In Chips

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Adviser Q&A
George Gilder: The Next Revolution In Chips

John Dobosz, 07.14.04, 5:37 PM ET

NEW YORK - In the late 1990s, George Gilder achieved a status similar to that of a rock star among technology investors, as the companies he wrote about in the Gilder Technology Report soared in value. His idea of the "telecosm" provided a unified field theory of computing and communications.

Gilder's paradigm held that the computing power enabled by the microprocessor was the first wave of an information technology revolution, but that faster and more efficient means of communication would usher in the new and even more powerful phase of the revolution--unlimited bandwidth available universally.

Stymied by a combination of government regulators and system architecture, Gilder's vision has yet to reach its full fruition. First of all, not all homes and offices have the "last mile" of high-speed connections to the Internet, something he says is hampered by a patchwork of regulations in all 50 states. As a result, South Korea currently has more bandwidth per capita than the U.S.

Another impediment, says Gilder, has to do with a different kind of patchwork, the kind that connects the awesome computing power of microchips to the light-speed of optical networks to carry data where it needs to go--something Gilder calls "storewidth." Also, most of the real estate on a chip, in fact, is devoted not to calculating power but to memory in the form of buffers and caches.

A private New Hampshire company called Xanoptix may be on its way to alleviating this bottleneck with technology that can "fuse" chips together with optical pins, greatly improving the communications speed of chips produced by companies like Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ), Advanced Micro Devices (nyse: AMD - news - people ), Xilinx (nasdaq: XLNX - news - people ), PMC-Sierra (nasdaq: PMCS - news - people ), Broadcom (nasdaq: BRCM - news - people ) and others.

Gilder recently spoke with us about the potential of Xanoptix's ability to use optics to revolutionize electronics.

Click here to watch a video.
http://www.forbes.com/investmentnewslett...

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