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IBM Announcements on Chip Design/Nanocommunications
mr was one of the folks who wrote about some IBM scientists who have discovered a way to transport information on the atomic scale that uses the wave nature of electrons instead of conventional wiring. The new phenomenon, called the "quantum mirage" effect, may enable data transfer within future nanoscale electronic circuits too small to use wires. Big Blue also unveiled some new chip technology, called "Interlocked Pipelined CMOS" that starts at 1 GHz, and will be able to deliver between 3.3 - 4.5 Ghz.
Is it just me, or has IBM made a real turnaround in the last 5+ years? It seems they understand the whole open source movement, they've pretty much ditched they're sorry aptivas, and they seem to be a leader in new technologies. On top of that they've changed the way people percieve them. I remember hearing stories about how they had to wear knee-high black socks to match their black suits long ago, and now I go to an interview with them, and the guy is wearing jeans and a Polo shirt!
Honestly, this is one large corporation I have respect for. And there aren't too many of those left now and days.
This was probably quite difficult to implement, but isn't exactly conceptually brilliant. Modern computers already run at different clock rates internally. Your disk I/O bus runs at one speed, your video processor runs at another speed and the CPU still spends a lot of time waiting for stuff to come down the system bus from memory.
;-)
It's even less conceptually brilliant, when you see what people elsewhere have been working on - namely wavepipelined architectures.
Funny... people just keep on reinventing the wheel... fire... and then they patent it to hell.
IIRC, the guys at Manchester University were working on this back in 1989/1990 (or at least they were when I went on a tour of the place...). Back then, it was just called the "wave pipelined RISC chip" - these days, it's the "Amulet". Check it out. It's based on ye olde ARM processor architecture - but the implementation is completely asynchronous -- that is, each individual logic element is clocked separately.
Sure, it's still experimental... sure, it's slower than other chips - but it also predates IBM's announcement by about 11 years. Just goes to show - academia ain't entirely useless
Links
Architectural Overview at Berkeley
The Amulet Asynchronous Logic Group at Manchester University
Who needs clocks? Bah!
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
To increase speed, IBM researchers decentralized the clock, using locally generated clocks to run smaller sections of circuits. The design thus allows faster sections of circuits the freedom to run at higher cycles. It also significantly reduces power requirements.
/. a few days ago.
This was probably quite difficult to implement, but isn't exactly conceptually brilliant. Modern computers already run at different clock rates internally. Your disk I/O bus runs at one speed, your video processor runs at another speed and the CPU still spends a lot of time waiting for stuff to come down the system bus from memory.
As far as I can see, IBM have scaled this down to a single chip, which will increase overall throughput considerably. Difficult to do, very worthwhile, but conceptually all they have done is to get the latency issues into a smaller space.
OTOH, this could lead to an architecture with considerably lower power consumtion, which is definitely worth doing.
The bit about 'quantum mirages' has already been discussed on
Ok the reference for this work is:
H. C. Manoharan, C. P. Lutz & D. M. Eigler, Nature403, 512-515(2000).
In this experiment a few Cobalt atoms were deposited on a Copper surface. Using a scanning tunneling microscope the Co atoms were gently dragged into an elliptic(coral) structure, and one Co atom was placed at the focus of the ellipse. (The images of this stuff are gorgeous and more cool STM images of atoms and atomic maniputation can be found at the STM Image Gallery).
Due to the magnetic nature of the Co atom electrons near the atom tend to align their spins with the Co magnetic field screening the magnetic moment. This local phenomina can be imaged by the STM, the surprising result is that another mirage image appears at the second focus of the ellipse. This suggests some sort of long range electon ordering.
These experiments are being done with a low temperature ultra-high vacuum stm (this stuff is damn hard) and to reproduce these same results in a next generation processor as a means to transport data is unlikely in the near future. Nevertheless, these results will have a great effect in our understanding of macroscopic quantum systems and ordering.
Using the 'quantum mirage' process, previously posted Slashdot stories magically reappear at another time and place.
I can see the error messages for Win2010 now:
"Error - user32.exe performed an illegal operation in this universe - please continue in another universe or restart..."
So does this mean that the IBM 1-piece 386 dos based terminals in my highschool's computer lab aren't state of the art anymore?
-- Just the FAQs Ma'am.