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A Well-Chilled 750GHz Feasible Within 5 Years
drkhong writes: "...at least if you've got a good cooling system. IEEE Spectrum has an article about the next generation ICs. Using superconducting materials cooled down to 5K a peak of 750GHz has already been reached. Just think about how far light goes within one clock cycle, and then tell me you aren't impressed." These low-temperature devices are made of niobium
(a superconducting metal), and use something called Josephson junction devices, resulting in chips for which the article states "there are no known physical barriers to decreasing size by a factor of 10 and thus increasing speed by a factor of 10, using lithography to move from today's 3-m linewidth to 0.3 m."
Information can travel no faster than the speed of light. Period.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
I mean it's cool and all... but I really don't want a desktop that can kill me if it has a coolant leak? It'd be great for supercomputers tho' =)
.technomancer
This is, of course, very impressive but let us not forget that this requires cooling down to five degrees Kelvin. We are well past heatsinks and fans at this point. Unless the prices come down, it will cost around twenty THOUSAND dollars to cool the chip down this much.
It will be a long time before you see a system like this on your desktop. Unless we develop room-temperature superconductors, of course. But that would change everything...
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
My karma is very high. booyeah! ;-)
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Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
This would probably be limited by quantum physics. I know that there are only a finite number of positions and velocities allowed in a given range (i.e., it's physically impossible to travel at exactly 55 mph). I'm not sure if time is also quantisized, but I imagine it is.
To get some idea, let's say we're looking at photons of light in the visable range at about 500nm. This corresponds to about 6E14 Hz, or rather, 600 trillion `frames' per second. To get much better, I suppose you would have to develop eyes that can see gamma rays or something like that.
So if the hottest video card out there (some time from now) claims it can do quake at more than like 10^15 fps, don't bother buying it.
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
750 GHZ of processing power!
Guaranteed to really make your 56K dial up experience more multimedia intensive and enjoyable!
Are you kidding? Have you seen the estimates Microsoft has made with their products? I think it'll be....
To install Windows 2005:
486/66 CPU (only one, don't try two or more)
150 Mb of Hard Drive space
24 Mb of available RAM (32 Mb suggested)
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
The article talks about a new Hypres (sp) AD converter that runs at 12 GS/s, and can dynamically change SNR for bandwidth, and vice versa (or at least # of bits, as the article says).
Do you have any idea how many bits this puppy can do per sample? I didn't find this number, strangely, within the article.
Thanks.
make world, not war
I feel compelled to chime in here. I studied Superconducting Electronics for a while as an EE grad student. The biggest issue was making memory out of superconductors of any reasonable density. Since we had so little memory, around 4K?, the efforts were concentrated on doing Digital Signal Processing. These operations do not require vast amounts of memory and are generally useful for real time digital signal filtering. Once the memory issue is resolved, I expect to see greater use of these processors for generic computing.
Incidently, a Josephson junction looks like this..
S I S (where S is a superconductor and I is an Insulator. The resulting junction provides non linear behavior and can act as an amplifier ala a funky transistor.
Cheers.
Shouldn't Moore's Law be take in the same vein as Murphy's?
Its more of a truism as it is a mathematical law, as it's only based on an observation of the way things seem to be.
An example,
If in finishing a messy project nothing went wrong, when something very well should have. I don't think this has proved Murphy's law as invalid, or that we should absolutly think that something went wrong because the result wildy violated it. Perhaps the best answer is that we should be skeptical of the result (nothing went wrong), beacause it goes against the 'wisdom' of the law.
To take this to the case at hand, we should only be skeptical of claims, because it seems to go against the guidelines stated in Moore's Law.
From a brochure for a car rental firm in Tokyo : When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigor.
i think you've found your source of heat when you mentioned the lack of 'light superconductors'... as seems to be the case with this, (please forgive my lack of understanding) but the heat would mostly come from circuits outside of the Josephson junctions.
"Ummmm..."
Applying concepts like that to the brain is useless. The brain is unbelieveably parallel, and runs asynchronously, so "how fast can we think?" really doesn't mean anything. I know you were just thinking of the sci-fi aspects of this and all, but this is one nut that just ain't gonna be cracked.
You forgot to allow for relativistic time-dilation. .4mm in one cycle.
The currents here are particles moving through niobium, not light. They have a momentum, and thus are subject to special relativity (not to mention general relativity).
I'm late for work, so I don't have time to do any calculations, but the gist of it is that _as far as the particles are concerned_ they can travel much further than
are jst an excse to gratitosly use the "" character.
This is as fallacious as the idea that I could have a long rigid rod from here to Alpha Centauri, and communicate with it in realtime by pushing and pulling on the rod.
(Hmm, how did i come to talk about rigid rods and fallacio in one sentence..)
1) It's not that bad at all. I'm fairly proficient at qwerty and I switched to Dvorak in no time, matching speeds in an hour. It's far easier the more layouts you learn, but even for a second layout there's no real problem.
:) I still have qwerty keys on it, just a little applet to switch between the two. I can still type just as fast as before with qwerty.
2) No-one dares touch my keyboard
It's no big performance hit, and you gain a lot from it. Give it a try, you might be surprised.
$ dc
.01571328000000000000
186000 5280 * 12 * p
11784960000
20 k
750000000000 / p
q
So 0.1571 inch is the distance light travels in a vacuum; I don't know about the speed in these materials.
749Ghz CPU (only one, don't try two or more)
100Tb of Hard Drive space(see section on SCSI drivers)
10Tb of available RAM (100Tb suggested)
Someone you trust is one of us.
Cheers,
Any predictions about RAM or Hard Drives in five years? Compared the progression of CPU speeds, increases in memory speed and capacity has been almost static. Perhaps RAMBUS can start suing for royalties even before they develop their PC750000 RIMM
Er, just to be pedantic...Waters wrote all the lyrics for DSOTM, didn't he?
-- And when Justice is gone, there is always... Force. --Laurie Anderson, "Oh Superman"
I'm not entirely sure about that - it's not my field of knowledge :-) but iirc, brains are said to go at about a thousand hertz because that's about the maximum speed at which brain cells can output signals.
I will thanks!
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
Not *that* much faster. Thats only 750 1ghz thunderbirds, I'm sure distributed.net has far more cpu power than that. Though if you had a distributed.net type setup with a few thousand 750ghz machines...
You're correct if you assume they're hard little
balls. But they're not. Info can't travel faster
than light.
More clarification on the above point is that
electrons through copper go @ about half the
speed of light.
According to scientists (there ought to be a link, but I can't remember it..), the maximum framerate a human can actually perceive is 76 fps. Higher than that might be easier on the eye (I know 100 Hz is clearly much more comfortable than say 60 Hz), but it's not possible to perceive higher than 76 Hz (fps).
/S
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
No, see, while the CPU will finally be fast enough, the amount of time it takes for the hard drive to read the needed 20 gigs of data (actually, it's only 500 MB, but due to Microsoft's patented read and re-read technology, it reads the data 40 times), it will still take an hour or more to boot. A spokesperson from Microsoft said they are looking into caching the data in a RAM drive so the subsequent reads will occur at a much higher rate. Computer experts warn that to be able to store the 500 MB of data, Windows will require an additional 4 GB of RAM, which will in turn drive up the costs of computers. Market analysts, however, are quick to point out the increased sales of RAM will help out our falling economy, giving it the boost it needs to recover.
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For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Nope. That's the whole point of 128 bits. Assuming you're doing brute force, and have 1000 of these computers overclocked to run at 1000 GHz (to make the math easier), and of course assuming that they can do one trial per cycle,
2 ^ 128 trials * 1 cycle / trial * 1 second / (10^12 aggregate computer cycles) * 1 year / (3600 * 24 * 365) = 10790283070806014 years = 10 quadrillion years.
Can you imagine the processor spending most of its time sitting around waiting for memory?
-jaded- walking the earth as a living corpse is in somewhat questionable taste
Two words.... "Beowulf Clusters"
I can see it now:
750Ghz PentiumXXXIV processor 1Ghz FSB 2Ghz memory 500Mhz access to storage and a graphics processor that is only capable of pumping out three frames per second in Quake 25. gazamm! a 750x multiplier? That's crazy...but it just might work...I think that if be better to get that FSB up tho...I think that would solve the apparent bottleneck causing that 3fps. Try it out and get back to me...
Someone actually built one of these and the stupid thing worked. Ran like a dog because everything needed to make multiple memory accesses and you had to execute zillions of instructions to actually accomplish anything. But clocked at 750 GHz and combined with some really fast memory...
good one :)
I've heard of water, but that's about it.
There are methods that the optics community uses to measure high speeds / short times. One such idea is an autocorrelator, which interferes a fast signal with a delayed version of itself, thus allowing you to map out the waveform shape. Possibly the 750GHz team made a version of one of these.
There are pulsed lasers that have pulse widths of less than a femtosecond (admittedly, you probably have to build these yourself and be careful with components). these are probably the best generators of delta functions, and are also probably used to probe some of these novel devices.
make world, not war
a Beowulf cluster of there?
uhhh...what does behind the curb mean? Did you intend to say curve? Regardless, they are shooting for 10GHz by then in a reasonably priced chip (of course, that still means a cool grand+). If superconductors were cheap, everything would be using them.
I submitted a more accurate review that, among other things, didn't confuse data rate and clock frequency, to Slashdot and Kuro5hin last week. Kuro5hin accepted it. You can read it and reader responses at:
/ 12/10/0925/1544
http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000
There's a difference between a signal and a fluxon. The fluxon couldn't travel faster than light, but it's possible for a signal to do so, since it's just information. A macroscopic example can be given with a well-trained marching line. Say that there is a gap between the first third of the line and the rest. Someone gives an order, and the middle third moves forward -- all the people moving simultaneously, since they're well trained -- to close the gap, while the back third remains in place. The gap has just instantaneously moved 1/3 the length of the marching line, without any actual object having to move faster than the speed of light.
I think it is very unlikely they will be able to do it cheaply, which is just as important as being able to do it at all. Otherwise, this technology will be of interest only to the military.
Don't forget that the military has played a significant role in almost all technology's birth to date. They have the (massive) funds to research fields without any saleable product in sight. The Internet (ARPANET), for example. Nuclear power. Rocket science. Jets. If they research superconducting enough, they may find a way (or help someone else find a way) to mass-produce it cheaply. In peacetime, really the only thing a military force is good for...!
Didnt Lain already do this?
no
I have a PII/233, 256M RAM, Win2K. The Open dialogue on Media Player appears almost instantaneously, but I'm assuming it's been cached from yesterday.
Yea! Since I just saw a factoid saying Windows 2000 is the largest 'program' ever writen (I'd say it's multiple programs...) - from Learning Kingdom - "A complete printout of its 29 million lines of source code would form a stack of pages 193 feet high (59 meters), about as tall as a 19-story building." So are faster processors a good thing? That is, doing a whole bunch of dumb things really fast is not nesc. better than doing a few smart things slower. Tell me about how x86 is being utterly thrown out the window and that will be exciting.
closed minded is as closed minded does
Well, now that we have macroscopic quantization of magnetic flux, and fluxon-switching devices, that Flux Capacitor can't be far off now can it? Anyone got a DeLorean sitting in the barn waiting to be refitted? Now's your chance!
--frank[at]unternet.org
When using light primarily instead of electricity, a lot less heat is generated. Would some of the more advanced chips be cool enough to run safely without a heat sink? If so, this would not only extend the life the standard CPU but slightly reduce the ammount of clutter in the standard PC box. //this message posted by powerpenguin from somewhere.
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Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
I find it's typing speeds that slow the user down, not the CPU. Surely Dvorak keyboards (once we're past the learning curve) will make the real difference. My typing speed tripled over a week...
Not that faster CPUs are bad, mind, just they don't solve the real issue.
still have two things:
- -------
1) stupid users
2) quantum crypt
with these in place, you can be sure to ignore how fast computers are and just think that it all ain't gonna matter none either way - quantum shouldn't be feasible to break, and stupid users assure that they'll leave the password on a yellow sticky right near where it should be used.
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There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
There are two huge problems with superconducting logic that don't seem solvable in the near future. They are:
1. Cost : These things are enormously expensive to manufacture and operate, and it is the economy of scale of CMOS techology which has enabled, more than anything, the current computing revolution. Do you have any idea how expensive coolant and the dewar to use it in are to get something to 5K? Even the so-called "high-temperature" superconductors have to be pretty damn cold to function; they just don't need to go so close to absolute-zero.
2. Integration This is probably the killer. It will be extremely difficult to integrate many devices together. Even if myriad technical difficulties are overcome, the solution is not likely to be inexpensive, as CMOS technology is. For III-V semiconductors (which use much less exotic materials than superconductors), high defect rate, problems with lattic matching of the materials, and the lack of a high quality native oxide (like SiO2 in silicon) have made it impossible to achieve integration levels anywhere close to that achieved in silicon. Even GaAs, the most well-understood III-V semiconductor, can't be integrated to more than a few thousand devices. That's why we don't have 20 GHz GaAs microprosessors. And superconductors are even HARDER to deal with.
In summary, even if researchers are able to overcome almost insurrmountable odds to find away to reliably integrate meaningful numbers of these devices on a single die, I think it is very unlikely they will be able to do it cheaply, which is just as important as being able to do it at all. Otherwise, this technology will be of interest only to the military.
By the way, I know III-V semiconductors have a lot of very important uses, especially in optics and RF. It is a fact, however, that III-V logic is mainly of interest to the military and the space industry.
Massive overclocker migration : the U.S. immigration department flooded with request to move the the south pole and some to the recently established mars colonies.
"Alaska ain't cold enough" says a disappointed overclocker, who burned is 5th Josephson CPU last week.Greenpeace trying to warn the government about environmentals risks :
"The cooling fluids used by those geeks might be dangerous for the ozone layers ands penguins".[Pruneau
Personally, (purely speculative) I think it will take 20 years or more, and precicely doped, multiwalled buckytubes. But by then we may well have nice optical computers, and will be busy playing "My So Called Life: The Game of Teenage Angst", with patented Voxel technology.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
I actually do have a 2nd hard drive with linux on it (well, of course!). Different IDE channel, though, and the drive stays spun down, so I don't think that's the problem. And this only happens with the newest version of media player; no other program. The dialogue box is just one example of how slow that program is ... it takes several seconds to load the thing, and mouse clicks have a significant lag before being processed...
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Even that's not correct. Electrons in copper move very slowly, on the order of centimeters/minute. Ripples, on the other hand travel at approximately half c (or thereabouts).
< pedant>
ISTR that Moore's law was about the number of transitors on a chip, not about the number of clockcycles.
</pedant>
(sorry, I'll get my coat and leave...)
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"Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a sick mind." (Terry Pratchett)
Well, this thing won't have transistors, according to the article.
:) )
(PS. Terse reply, will write more later, am late for work
By "technology," I wasn't referring to the wires, but to the low temperature hardware for which one would need the wires. It's the NSA, after all. What kind of low temperature "instruments" could they need? When they develop technology, it's for one of two purposes, survellance or computing, and I don't see how supercooled devices would be useful for survellance.
I tried it, but it fried my memory, and the IDE controllers.
God, if we still have conventional RAM and IDE at that point in time, I don't think it's worth waiting for.
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Now we can make Word 2005 scroll faster!
Software RAID doesn't add much overhead on a SCSI based system. But I would prefer to just have a faster storage medium.
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Software companies are going to have to work very hard to keep up with developments like these. If high end systems are at 750GHz, ordinary computers will probably be in the 300-400GHz range and have a good TB or so of memory. Its going to take incredible, nay, epic, levels of code bloat to make sure that we continue to experience no net increased in perceived computer speeds.
You're thinking of it the wrong way. Electrons travel terribly slow, but if one pushes the one beside it, and that ones pushes the one next to it the flow of electricity is essentially instantaneous, and requires a negligible amount of time to propogate.
(first week of release)
500Ghz: $5,000,000
750Ghz: $6,000,000
(6 months later)
500Ghz: $5,000
750Ghz: $6,000
As another user already pointed out, even if this thing were one million times faster than Intel and AMD's current stuff (which it isn't), breaking 128 bit encryption would still take time well beyond the death of the universe.
Doesn't this wildly violate it? Right now we're at 1.5 GHz. Moore's law states that this will double every 18 months. That's about three times it should double in the next five years. La la la, David does some simple math:
12GHz.
Hmm. I know that Moore's law is just a rough estimate, but so far we've stuck to it pretty faithfully, right? If the rate of increase is increasing (aaaahhhhh! semantically difficult sentence!), I'm gonna be really impressed with where our technology goes!
Unless they mis-estimated their release date (and we know that's never happened) by about six years.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
It seems like every time newer, faster processors come out or more RAM is possible to shove onto a mobo, or larger hard drives are possible, M$ Office gets larger and more CPU intensive!
So, will software keep up the trend it is now from M$'s perspective or will it follow trend as open source usually does with good programmers (or groups of programmers) that try to keep the programs running with small footprints?
And as an aside, does this mean Quake II will startup instantaneously before we even click it?!
If this comes to pass, it could blow Moore's Law and CPU projections into a growth spurt that would make 18 months look like a lifetime. (CPU speed doubles every 18 days?) - ,at least for a while - If this comes to pass, it would justify the change we made from TripleDES and Rijnael. It could also knock a hell of a blow in factoring large primes - the mainstay of public-key cryptography
Hell, I don't even feel comfortable with that. Give me 1024 bit private key encryption. I can find a use for it!!
RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Close, but actually the real market for 750Ghz in the home is Quake players who think polygons are 'not sufficient' and want real-time ray tracing at 60fps. I'm one of them. Is 750Ghz going to be sufficent for 'toy story' level rendering in real time?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I have to go to the drugstore to buy a few more pounds of liquid helium, I'll be back after lunch.
Hmmmm... then does that mean that if you never return you'll be missing, presumed fed?
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
What are the chances we'll actually see these in our home systems in 5 years? What are the chances we'll NEED that much power in 10-15 years? I'd say none. Even if they could perfect a unit for home computing, who would buy it? I know very few people with CPUs over 400MHz, even with these 1GHz+ CPUs out today, there's very few real needs for that much power. Just me or has there been one CPU news post per day on average lately? If I see that Intel logo one more time I'm going to hurt small kittens.
I suspect that advances in insulating materials, most of which have been recently declassified, will make cryogenic circuitry usable in smaller, possibly even desktop-sized machinery.
Consider that the entire integrated circuit set could be built onto a substrate (standard thick-film assembly modded for low temperature) and then the entire package surrounded with aerogel or foamed silica insulation. A heat pump or chiller (Peltier devices, sterling cycle fridge, whatever) is attached through a window, and then the heat removed from the device. Given the kind of heat transfer rates you can get now, the heat pump section would only have to be slightly larger than the max power consumption of the circuitry.
Okay, so it will take ten minutes to cool down to the point where the main processor works. This would be any different from waiting for Windoze to boot?
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Well, several things happened:
- Nobody figured out how to make reseasonalbe P-channel devices.
- Small geometries were much harder, because III/V and II/VI type (more than one element) semiconductors suffer from a whole bunch of problems where, which in my limited understanding (I'm a circuits guy) are due to the wrong atom at a place in the crystal lattice, such as a Ga where and As should have been.
- It's easy to take Silicon Dioxide (glass) for granted, until you try to figure out a good way to make insulators on other materials.
- All the while, good ole Si kept getting better and better... not only faster, but higher densities. Today's CPU speed is as much a function of using lots of transistors as it is their speed. As more transistors were available, everyone invested a lot of research and thought into ways to use them to run code faster (superscaler architecture, branch prediction, out-of-order and speculative execution, etc)
Now I've been watching the J-junction for several years now, though I know much less about how it really works that I ought to. I do know there's a big difference between a test device and processes that produce only thousands of them to being viable for a modern microprocessor. GaAs transistors are hugely popular for RF applications, where you only need a small number of them. Today nobody believes the world will eventually be overtaken by GaAs based microprocessors.It seems unlike the world will really be overtaken by J-Junction microprocessors, at least in our lifetimes. Maybe that's just wishful thinking, since I've got a lot of energy invested in transistors, and with a bit of luck that'll remain valuable for another 25 years... but then again, look what happened to all those guys how only knew about tubes!
Anyways, the point is that there's a big difference between a small number of insanely fast test devices to a high density processor with all the other requisites to make a reasonable microprocessor.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
They didn't really say how they got these clock frequencies
Pretty easy I assume, given that Josephson junctions oscillate at frequency dependent on the applied voltage. (In fact Josephson junctions are used for calibration of voltage meters since we can measure frequency to extreme precision). 750 GHz corresponds to EM radiation with wavelength of 0.4mm that will be given off by the circuit and can be observed.
si si senor =)
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
Moore's law (or estimation,) states that "the processing power you can buy for a thousand dollars will double every year" (It has been revised to every nine months, I believe.)
You won't be buying one of these for a grand anytime soon. If anything this falls right into Moore's law, figuring a decade or so for the price to drop.
.sigless since 2003
We'd be able to simulate whole wars with each person playing an individual soldier. How cool would THAT be?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Could this mean the development of a 'digital' microwave that doesn't use a noisy magnetron?
"I never notice far-away objects not showing up"? You've never been at sea, have you?
So much for your theory. Hah! The universe is not hardware accelerated, it's rendered with handcoded i386 assembly, utilizing every dirty trick known to the Assembly '95 contestants.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
use a 750ghz bewolfe to heat your office building!
A few years ago in Minneapolis a company (Honeywell?) decided to shut down their old mainframe because they discovered they only had one job still running on it, eaisally ported to new machines. The day before the final shut off the janitors discovered that the building was built without heaters because the comptuer gave off enough heat to need cooling even in the coldest Minnesota winter. They ended up selling time on the mainframe (for peanuts, not even recovering energy costs) for 2 more years until they could install a heater.
You're confusing theory with theorem. Theorems are solid. They must be proven from axioms or other theorems. There are occasional misnomers, such as Fermat's Last Theorem was really just a conjecture until about 5 years ago, but in general theorems, which are mathematical, are much more ironclad than "laws" which tend to be about observed physical phenomena.
Unfortunately, interconnect (materials, traces, connectors, etc) cannot support these data rates. The whole system would have to be supercooled.
"Honey, We're going to have to take out the kids room in order to put in the new 300 gallon liquid N2 dewar I just ordered... What?"
Eric
Make it idiot-proof and someone will build a better idiot.
It seems to me that this technology could be incredibly useful, but only for a limited number of things. Sure, you can do all sorts of internal stuff at 750Gb/s, but then you have the problem of interfacing with your input or output at normal semiconductor/optical speeds, far below 750Gb/s. It also seems a lot of complicated computations could not be carried out unless this IC had an INSANE amount of cache, because communicating with memory would be so cycle-expensive.
With their example of network switching, I wonder how exactly switch at that speed, and then not run into delivery bottlenecks. Does anyone who knows more about networking than I have any additional insight on how this could be accomplished?
NSParadox
Unless mankind redesigns itself
The Freon!
....Space Quest 2 on one of these things.... BTW... I bet that it still takes forever to boot up.
This is absurd. The cost of keeping such a superconductor at 5 K is going to keep the general public, and even most corporations, from buying this technology. It's expensive to keep a box at that temperature in the lab (I should know, I'm a chemist). Only the US government would be willing to shell out the money for these low-maintenence devices (maybe). Corporations would rather just use the money to buy the computing speed in multiple CPUs rather than as one - it'd be a hellofa lot cheaper.
Perhaps the people working on the project will eventually be able to use a superconducting material that works at liquid nitrogen temp instead of niobium (perhaps a yttrium complex like we use now? - I don't know the specifics of this 700GHz IC or whether it would be able to use Yttrium complexes). In that case, the cost will go down and perhaps we'll see more corporations buying this tech. In order for personal consumers to buy a 700GHz computer, we'd have to have room-temp or near-room-temp superconductors.
But then we run into one of the hugest physics problems of the late twentieth century. The scientific community no longer has the enthusiasm it once had for searching for that "perfect" superconductor.
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
The real question is, when does storage/memory speed get to catch up to processor speeds?
Frankly, I've got a dual PII 333 and more often than not the bottleneck is waiting for my (already RAID striped SCSI based) thrashing hard disk to catch up. When is that going to change?
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"Honey, with this new cryogenics tower computer, I'll be able to get my computing done faster, so I can then spend more time on YOUR needs."
:^)
Simple.
maybe someone confused the 750Gb/sec with 750GHz.
c(m/s) / 750GHz (1/s) = 4e-4 meters.
Yeiks
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
That should be 10 to the -18th power, not 10 to 18...
Wise man say, choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them...
imagine a peltier on one of these. i bet you could overclock it to at least 833ghz...
Just think how fast Windows will crash now.
Oh dear, you can tell someone is married... :P
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
At those speeds, interconnect latency is a major problem. A photon can only travel 40 microns during a single clock cycle of that puppy. So chip layout becomes extremely important.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Didn't a superconducting chip lead to the creation of killer robots?! All the science fiction books that I read as a kid are coming true...
Ryan Finley
Ryan Finley
SurveyMonkey.com -- Create your own professional surveys
Dec SciAm (not online) shows nanotaubes a 1/20th
the diameter of current wiring and very fast.
There's an additional factor of 2 because, on average, you only need to check half the possibilities. So it's actually 5 quadrillion years. See? Now that seems much more achievable!
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Shouldn't that be 10^15 aggregate/second? 1GHz = 1,000,000,000 Hz = 10^9 cycles/second, so 1000GHz = 10^12 cycles/second, and with a thousand of those machines it's 10^15 aggregate cycles/second, right? So it's only 10 trillion years... Not that's more reasonable! :-)
SMQ 90AE4B2BC4F6BEAF7340F0B40BA2DEF7340F6BC2D0392
Our brain works at about a thousand hertz. But you can't really compare brains and cpu's, brains are very parallel.
And even then, even if you get a zillion-terahertz CPU, it still can't think. It's the software that should do the "thinking". Just as larger brains != more intelligence, faster processors != (more) intelligence.
Would it be simpler to tie it right into our lobe than to use something primitive like a keyboard and mouse? Obviously the technology to do so isn't here, yet
Actually, there is, this has been invented quite some time ago. But you could only get 2chars/minute the last time I heard about it :-)
They used Fluorinert. The -100C overclockers were playing with that.
I also think one of the Crays used artificial blood plasma as the coolant.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Lynx... renders quickly for me. :-P
With the advent of the 300MHz processor, the 233 I purchased became dirt cheap. Now that there are 1.5 GHz chips out, you can get an 800 MHz chip dirt cheap. When the 750GHz chips are produced, I will be lined up to buy an obsolete 500GHz chip that will be fast enough to start windows from boot in less than three minutes! Yay bleeding edge subsidizing second-stringers!
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Today MS-IBM-AOL-Time Warner-AT&T-Jiffy Lube Announces that computers no longer need monitors. Thanks to Moore's law, computing power has been doubling every 18-24 months. As such we now have CPUs that operate at well above the 750,000,000,000,000Hz range, well above the range of visible light. However, due to the high frequency with which theses CPUs operate they can not be very large. Thanks to advances in parallel processing by MS-IBM-AOL-Time Warner-AT&T-Jiffy Lube modern computers can be produced with millions of CPU's all working simultaneously. By arranging these CPUs in a square or rectangular pattern the computer's CPU grid becomes the computer's visual interface device. MS-IBM-AOL-Time Warner-AT&T-Jiffy Lube has announced their next goal will be to make the worlds first parallel processing tanning bed.
that you can rearrange the letters in "overclocker" to spell "clever crook"?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You'll need 750GHz just to run Windows CE 2005...but that little paper clip is SOOOOOOOOOOO cute!
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If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, forget 'em, because man, they're gone. -- Jack
Thats precisely why Strom Thurman should use 256bit encryption!
0 00000 years... he should be retired by then at least.
2 ^ 256 trials * 1 cycle / trial * 1 second / (10^12 aggregate computer cycles) * 1 year / (3600 * 24 * 365) = 3160000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
I think Moore's Law is only supposed to apply to transistor count in semiconductor logic; since this is a totally different technology, I'm not sure that it even applies.
The mention of Pentium-class in a post talking about 750Ghz is almost enough to make me want to throw up.
There has got to be something better than x86. And if consumers are still stuck with x86 when processor speeds hit 750Ghz for the common computer, well, I have lost my interests in computers for life.
I can see it now:
750Ghz PentiumXXXIV processor 1Ghz FSB 2Ghz memory 500Mhz access to storage and a graphics processor that is only capable of pumping out three frames per second in Quake 25.
We have got to leave behind the baggage before we hit multi-Ghz speeds. Please god, don't keep the architecture.
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Sun claims MAJC will be able to render Toy Story in realtime, so this has to be WAY faster. Keep dreaming :-)
Those who say this blows Intel out of the water are wrong. In ten years chances are you will still have an Intel machine on your desk (or AMD, I am not an Intel whore.) Therefore Intel's annoucement is probably more applicable to you and me -- unless you use supercomputers on a daily basis.
One problem with these high clock rates is that you end up having to pipeline things rather excessively all over the place. I'd imagine at 750GHz that even a single 64-bit ADD would be pipelined over multiple cycles, due to transport delay!
Think about it: Light travels about 1 foot per nanosecond (30cm). At 1GHz speeds, a signal could travel well across a die if it were unimpeded (eg. could travel at the speed of light). In fact, it could theoretically travel most of the way across the motherboard in one clock period. At 750GHz, light travels 0.4mm per clock tick -- about 1/20th the way across a typical CPU die (assuming a die in the range 8mm x 8mm to 10mm x 10mm die -- not too far off what we build today). We're talking 20 pipeline stages just to get from one edge of the die to the other, if we can travel at the full speed of light in a vacuum. And the bad news is that we probably can't -- just look at todays CPUs!
What'll happen is that highly parallelizable problems will speed up, and inherently serial problems will end up staying the same. All of your number crunching for playing video games will rocket along since the calculations can be pipelined and parallelized, but the twisty, turny, five-instructions-and-a-branch control code won't speed up much.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
Now we just have to get the price down... Superconductors and 5K cooling systems are both insanely expensive. However, if I can get one of these today, I'd be willing to install the cryogenics facility in my house. That 750Ghz system would be a nice litte boost up from my P133 :)
Intel will not get there untill June 2014 (I think I did this right...) 1.5 Ghz (Dec 2000) 3 Ghz (Jun 2002) 6 Ghz (Dec 2003) 12 Ghz (Jun 2005) 24 Ghz (Dec 2006) 48 Ghz (Jun 2008) 96 Ghz (Dec 2009) 192 Ghz (Jun 2011) 384 Ghz (Dec 2012) 768 Ghz (Jun 2014) 1.536 Thz (Dec 2015) 3.072 Thz (Jun 2017) 6.144 Thz (Dec 2018) 12.288 Thz (Jun 2020) 24.576 Thz (Dec 2021) 49.152 Thz (Jun 2023) 98.304 Thz (Dec 2024) 196.608 Thz (Jun 2026) 393.216 Thz (Dec 2027) 786.432 Thz (Jun 2029) 1.572864 ?hz (Dec 2030)
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -Gilmore
How fast could you break 128bit ssl with that? It seems that could open a whole new window of problems for privacy advocates.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
Joe Consumer -
"750GHZ! WOW! NOW I CAN RUN AOL EVEN FASTER!
AND WITH 56k AOL IS FASTER THAN EVER!"
I just can't see explaining why I need a cryogenics tower for my computer to my wife...
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
The article states that it reaches 100 GHz, not 750. The bit transfer rate can reach speeds of 750 gigabits/second, still an awesome transfer rate, by any means...
I went to a conference on pulsed lasers about two weeks ago (I'm a physics student working with femtosecond lasers) and I can tell you that the shortest pulse widths ever achieved are of 4-5 femtoseconds.. no one ever got a width 10^-15s because of frequency dispersion in dispersive materials (prisms, lens..) However, you have a good point saying they could have use an autocorrelator for mesuring the frequency of the transistors..
So what, are we just going to take a large leap over the GHz section of clock cycles. We were in the MHz phase for at least 20 years. Now we're talking about nearly going to THz in less than 5
Finally a subject on which I have a decent contribution to make. I wrote a technical report on the technologies behind the current fastest supercomputers and on up-and-coming innovations. This gives a high-level overview of ASCI Red, IBM's Blue Gene, and the HTMT (superconducting technology based) project. Follow this link to the LaTeX2HTML version or download the Postscript version.
"The urge to fly from modern systems, instead of moving through them to even greater, fairer things is, I think, an indi
That's basically what you will get if current trends continue.
Think about how long we were stuck with hard drives on the same speed bus. Now we've had some progress lately with FSB and hard drive bus speeds increasing (ever so slowly) up the the big, bad ATA100 spec (is it really that noticeably different?).
Do you really think we will get beyond ATA500 (or a little more) before we break the next barrier (1,000Ghz) in processor speed? Not unless we break away from the current fast processor/slow memory/slower storage systems. I just want to see that end before I die. Persistent, and consistent memory (as in, same speed as the processor itself) that can double as storage (hence the persistence) and is relatively inexpensive. God, I would kill for such a thing.
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Yeah, well, the servers crashed because they're cryogenically cooled superconductors, and we ran out of liquid helium this week.
I have to go to the drugstore to buy a few more pounds of liquid helium, I'll be back after lunch.
Uh...thin indium wires are used routinely on any instrument running at very low temperatures to limit heat input. The only way you can get a signal out of an instrument at say 4K and keep the instrument at that temp is to use thin wires.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
There's a fairly intelligent discussion of this at http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm, but do bear in mind that there may be more in the manner of the processing than the volume of it...
Our brain works at about a thousand hertz.
How do you arrive at your estimate? I know our brains are massively parallel (and there's no quantitative way to measure "how parallel" they are compared to, say, clusters of CPUs), but I wasn't aware of a way we could translate even the "speed" of our brains into clock cycles per second.
More information, please!
Anyway, wonder what games would be like at insanely high framerates. Imagine it - motions so smooth, they make real life look choppy and jerky. Human beings would look like nothing compared to the quadrillion-polygon, ultra-smooth models.
The idea isn't new; Congo used a "special form of diamonds" that would be used in exactly this manner as the McGuffin that was the excuse for them to go to Africa. And the book dates back 20 years.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
If 750GHz is a factor of 10 increase on current tech, where the hell is my 75GHz CPU?
"Um, my Winders 2000 blue screened, and then I heard a pop, and everyone in the back office is frozed up hard as a rock"
IIRC, isn't Moore's law a relationship between time and transistor count rather than time and speed? While one could find a correlation between transistor count and speed, it's not really as relevant as people think.
:)
I think it could, theoretically be possible (although rather improbable) to reach 750GHz in 5 years and stay right on time with Moore's law, it would just be a matter of cooling.
or maybe I'm an idiot. I dunno. i hope I'm right, because by posting I just lost the ability to moderate this thread
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
at those temperatures, make sure that you don't hit it with a hammer lest you'll have shattered little bits of CPU everywhere....
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
I wonder if this will be able to be used by researchers in the forseeable future.
There is a lot of basic science which is still to difficult for todays supercomputers in a reasonable time frame.
A good example of this is computational fluid dynamics (CFD). People have the knowledge to simulate this at a fundamental level (Direct Numeric Simulation DNS) but not the power except for simple flows at relatively low Reynolds numbers.
If something like this were unleashed in the CFD community we could possibly see some rapid advances in many areas including anything with turbulent fluids (weather prediction for example).
Only at high resolutions. At resolutions like 640x480 and 800x600, we're still limited by system bus.
How 'fast' does our brain work? Can we generalize the synaptic process into a 'Hertz' unit of speed? Can this thing 'think' faster than a human brain? Would it be simpler to tie it right into our lobe than to use something primitive like a keyboard and mouse? Obviously the technology to do so isn't here, yet, but its kinda like sci-fi coming to life...
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I've worked for 4 months at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, and there's only one thing you can use to cool down to 5K: liquid helium.
We used liquid helium to cool our experiment. Back in '93 in bulk it costs about $10 CDN per litre. And it evaporates instantly on contact with air. You need to use liquid nitrogen to make sure that the surfaces holding the liquid helium are cold enough so that the helium doesn't just completely evaporate on contact.
I saw another post saying $20k to cool the machine. That might be the cost per month of operation. While super fast chips may be feasable, the most cost effective cold you're going to get is just from liquid nitrogen. I'd probably try to start from there as a benchmark.
(This is the kind of thing I expect to read about some drunk New Zealanders doing in their basement. LHe is just a bit too expensive, I guess...)
How did they figure out that 750GhZ was truly reached? If it was the first device to run that high, what did they use to measure it's speed?
I'm detecting a black hole. think.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
If you think the gov't is gonna let us get our grubby hands on this asap then keep hitting that crack pipe.
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
750 Ghz?
I don't even have a need for 750 Mhz. Something tells me there won't be a huge rush to buy the 750Ghz Pentium whatever.
...other than the insane Quake players who think the reason they keep getting killed is that 150fps is not sufficient for really smooth action scenes.
approximately... yes, impressed indeed!
If you thought people came up with extreme overclocking methods before, just wait until they try to reproduce this in their garages....
The Free ODMG Project needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
He said that it hasn't reached its potential. And indeed it has not. Yes, the classic case is the Japanese train system. But there's a million and one other places it could be used well, and hasn't. Yes, there's a handful of consumer devices you can buy that utilize some form of fuzzy logic. But it has not reached its potential. (I wonder why we [the US] love to throw out so much good tech. And then Japan takes it and runs a hundred miles an hour with it. And we wonder why they have all the cool toys and we don't..)
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
If moore's law holds, and I'm not one to predict whether or not an estimate would fail (who am I to do such a thing?) we should be somewhere around six or seven gigahertz by the time we're all scoffing at this article's headline.
Six or seven gigahertz. We'll be finished simplifying the user interface FAR before then. We'll be fancifying it.
--
Game over, 2000!
Hey fellow sloppy programmers,
You have now been taken off the list of soon-to-be-fired list.
Rejoice!
Who knows, maybe soon you can even get away with having an infinite loop in your code and not having problem!
Regards,
Technically Incompetent
I gotta get one of those. Maybe /. would finally render in an acceptable amount of time. :)
750Ghz CPU! right on! Will my 133mhz FSB support this? How will my 128kb of L2 handle that? Will it have SMP and DDR support?
And the most burning question of all...
How many KKeys/sec?
I can't wait to see my computer glow deep purple. Hell, I'd be able to expose photoresist with my processor. What's even better, all they need to do is crank it up a little more to start giving people cancer in five minutes flat.
Stop thinking so linearly. To use clocked devices at such high frequencies is dangerous. Ever heard of cell phones? A clocked device at 750 GHz will produce radiation in the visible spectrum, near the UV. crank it up a few GHz and you have a UV tanning salon in your own home. You'll be able to cook yourself from the outside-in.
By the time this technology ever comes around, hopefully the photonics industry will have come into its own and replaced the clocked device arena with switched light devices.
I could just see it: Intel starts competing in the microwave business with their new super hot 750ghz chips, which flash fry food in seconds. Hell use a 750ghz bewolfe to heat your office building!
Aside from that I don't see what the point is. Without RAM to match the 750ghz clock speed the chip's value would be seriously reduced. But I digress.
Maskirovka
History is on the move: those who fail to keep up will be left behind. Those who get in the way won't survie at all.
Don't you just love the way that this is called Moore's "Law", whereas a^2+b^2=c^2 is the Pythagorean "Theorem" no matter how many times it is proven?
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
From the article:
Ribbon cables with very thin copper traces to limit heat input have been developed by Tektronix Inc., Beaverton, Ore., IBM Corp.'s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and others, under a program managed by the U.S. National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Md.
It's not surprising that the NSA would be interested in this technology, but I do find it striking that there's such a blatant connection. If I was to guess, I'd say they're probably way ahead of industry and academia on this one. After all, what's the rush to have a supplier of those cables, if labs would eventually have to develop them on their own anyway once the state of their technology required it?
I can get 100,000 frames / second on Q3. Dammit, I can see the difference!!
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I hope I have some really big power supplies for those fans and peltiers.
Imagine how expensive it would be to replace one of these if you were to burn one up.
sup
Now... just before I die, I'll cryogenically freeze myself with my computer, and it will go faster than ever!
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!