The return of the vacuum tubes

Long ago, I took a class in eletronics. At the time, I had no mentor, no one to really encourage me to give serious consideration of the potential power of electronics. My teacher, Mr. Vallens, had a terrible lisp and he just didn’t do the subject justice. And in that class, I was working with vacuum tubes.

Vacuum tubes? You mean like in our old TV? I remember them well. Little bulbs of glass with pins on the bottom and little metal plates sealed in vacuum, inside. They would pop like a light bulb when you smash ’em. Obsolete, right? Do you know that there are people fitting out stereo systems with vacuum tubes to pass their digital music through tubes to give it that “analog” sound? You know, a sort of warm and fuzzy music?

Then I learned about integrated circuits and chips, but only superficially. I thought that with those chips, the vacuum tube was dead. I learned about Moore’s Law, the one that says that the number of transistors we can pack on a chip will double every 18 months. And for a long, long time, that has held true.

But there is talk about Moore’s Law coming to an end in 2025. There is just so much you can do with silicon. We can’t make it go much faster than 5 GHz without frying the chip. That’s 5 billion clock cycles a second. The latest i7 chips from Intel clock out around 5 Ghz.