In the future, we may need to scale up the time resolution, for example we may need time resolution up to 1 yoctosecond, because everything is faster. 64 bits wont be enough, so we will have that problem for sure.
Of course, things will change in the future but I don’t see processors getting any faster than 5ish GHz without some breakthrough in technology? What applications/hardware might first be able to go beyond a septillionth of a second?
If propagation delay is the concern (talking about high frequency) then electrons over copper do a better job than photons over fiber. (grain of salt, future dedicated photonic interconnect may have better performance).
> Our brain is much more powerful than current processor
Again, if we're talking about frequency (30GHz, 1THz) the brain is faster due to the way it's organized not because it operates at high frequencies.
> Even 1THz is possible with modern tech [...] super fast single-atom processors
Not in any meaningful way and we certainly aren't anywhere near "single-atom processors".
Perhaps your comment meant to say that sometime in the future we won't need high frequency because we'll change the way we design processors, not that we can build 1THz CPUs because our brain is more powerful then them.
It's possible to do a lot with "modern technologies", even cure cancer or solve world hunger etc., we just either haven't actually found a way to do some of those things, or at least not a feasible, useful way. This renders the statement a bit meaningless. We've had THz transistors for a decade now. There are dozens of reasons you don't see them in general purpose CPUs though.
Brain frequency is measured in single digit Hertz. Yep, it's much faster at many tasks due to the way it's organized.
> Not in any meaningful way and we certainly aren't anywhere near "single-atom processors".
We are, but it doesn't look like processor at all. Imagine that you have just two operations: match and propagate (copy). If input matches predefined pattern, then signal will propagate to next stage. If not, then signal will be lost. Such simple architecture can perform complex calculations with massive inputs and massive depth of processing area. If it implemented as optical flow, then it can process data at speed of light.
But we aren't really are we?
>> we just either haven't actually found a way to do some of those things, or at least not in a feasible, useful way.
We have a lot of theoretical concepts, we might even have the technology to build something like this. But we just haven't put it all together, and building this into a useful product is far into the future. My cold fusion powered portable true quantum computer says so. :)
https://phys.org/news/2020-01-physics-analog-recurrent-neura...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2208975-ai-made-from-a-...
> it's possible to make faster processor than 30GHz. Even 1THz is possible with modern tech [...] millions of super fast single-atom processors
This is the statement I contradicted and this is the statement you may want to refer to. First time you defended it with a "yes but" yet after 2 attempts you still haven't provided actual examples of either. We already agreed that even things like the brain can be pretty powerful and yet completely different from how we do artificial processing these days. But that was not the point.
We've had such concepts already working for years with sieve analysis [0] where stacks of sieves can give you the size and sometimes even shape of objects just by placing them in. Or analog computing that solves the travelling salesman problem faster than any digital computer can today [1]. But we obviously can't build anything useful with it that can surpass what we already use now.
Today we cannot build any useful or feasible 30GHz (let alone 1THz) or single-atom CPUs. We have stuff that's "promising", "indicates the possibility", and "on paper". As I said, we may even have the tech to do it but haven't connected all the dots yet which still means we can't do it today. At least not without moving the goalposts so much that the discussion stop making sense.
Nobody knows what the future needs are but there will be applications that need that resolution for sure!