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To: Greg Jung who wrote (20204)	11/16/1998 9:12:00 PM
From: Ira Player	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25960

Greg, I'm not going to say what the "killer, gotta have" application is going to be. But I will say, there will be one or more applications that the general public soon "can't live without". Who would have believed that there would be a mass market for something in the PII class? That power wasn't available to researchers just a few years earlier and suddenly junior is playing 3D games with it. The trend is still in place. The market has not reached saturation. It is still possible to lower costs through smaller line widths, at a given level of performance, so the shrinks will continue. IMO, economic barriers exist that will not allow large scale commercial production below 100 nm or so. But that's still a few years out ... Ira

To: Greg Jung who wrote (20204)	11/16/1998 9:24:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25960

Greg - A prediction based more on hope than analysis, I am guessing, and so to begin the analysis, what new masses of computational machines do we need to conduct our lives in the next few years? Yes and no. I'll admit that predictions of future demand are indeed more of an art than a science and hence all of the poor predictions. But as for predictions of the death of the advance of 'semiconductor technology', it's been done before by very famous people and they have been wrong: Bill Gates ~1987 - 'I don't see that anyone will ever need more than 640K of memory' CEO of IBM ~1949 - 'There is no need for more than 6 computers in the world' As shrinks continue and price points come down computers will show up in lots of things in which they don't currently exist (e.g. cable companies are starting to distribute computers in the form of Set Top Boxes and whether you choose to believe it or not palm pilots are very very popular, and will get more so as they drop to less than $100.) But it isn't just about price points, it is also about capability. As shrinks continue it is possible to get smaller, lighter cell phones that last longer on a single charge. It is also possible to get more realistic video games, voice recognition, ... . Bottom line, there may be hiccups in demand where one driver take over from another (we may be in that mode now - communications is taking over from computers, at least Bill Gates seems to think so), but to say that it's all over is a little odd. Clark

To: Greg Jung who wrote (20204)	11/17/1998 10:48:00 PM
From: ScotMcI	Respond to of 25960

One phenomenon that is noticeable is that as technology gets cheaper/better, people think of new ways to use it, or just plain use more of it. When I was in engineering school, a scientific calculator cost $395, probably about the equivalent of $1500 today. Very few people could afford one. Now, I have them in every room of my house. They're giving them away when you buy magazine subscriptions. After the price got below that of a Big Mac, was there really any 'need' to make them even cheaper? No, but they got cheaper nonetheless, and now you can practically find them in penny dishes. I don't think you necessarily need future 'killer apps' to justify the continued drive to make circuitry smaller/faster/lower power/etc. (although 'killer apps' will be found to absorb whatever amount of computational power is available, I am confident). "It takes all the running you can do just to stay in one place," as the Red Queen said. It will happen just because it must.