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Intel Claims 10Ghz Transistor
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary writes: "Intel has developed a new CMOS chip technology
that cranks out 10Ghz, 400 million transistors per
chip, with each transistor only 3 atoms thick,
previously thought impossible. See story
at
Dial Electronics
" While this story's rather fluffy, it makes it sound like Intel is a few years ahead of it's earlier projection of reaching 10Ghz by 2005. Of course, maybe they meant integrated into actual chips;) (in which case 2005 still sounds nice).
I read them a long time ago, but something about how it was quicker for the information to be manipulated on this vast, multinoded energy based network instead of the silicon circuitry of typical hardware.
Who knows? Maybe Card's insights were more than just a really good read?
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
> purify it and get rid of all the isotopes that
> do decay and you're left with something pretty
> hard to get anything through.
[Ignoring the fact that lead is electrically conductive, and would therefore make a really bad chip casing...]
This would mean that the material that your computer was built from would have to have its isotopes separated using a centrifuge or a calutron. This would make your computer pound for pound the same price as weapons-grade uranium since the same process would have to be used (though for the opposite effect). Anybody know what the going rate for U238 is? I'm afraid my Sears catalog doesn't list it. ;-)
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As we've come to expect from Intel, they are doing a tremendous amount of R&D in their fab labs. Intel has some of the best fabrication technology in the business (perhaps only IBM's is better). But when's the last time you heard of Intel actually doing anything revolutionary with that fab technology? That would be 1975. Since then they've only made the same processor over and over again. Seems like such a shame to let all this technology go to waste producing the same processors they made when they launched the company... Will the new IA64 technology be any better? Maybe. Early returns from people working on the architecture seem to indicate that it's just as much of a bitch to work with as x86, but perhaps it's too early to tell. Of course, that technology is 2 years late already anyway.
I can see it now... They end up using the first test model of this marvelous processor at a UN conference, and as you said, the electrons jump into the wrong stream... The following ensues:
George Bush: We welcome Russia into our boussom!
Translation: We (electrions start jumping) are here to inform you that we are taking over your weakling country!
*grins*
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
I found this:
"Recently there has been increased emphasis on radiation effects in space due to an increasing number of satellite launches for commercial and defense systems. The natural space environment can damage electronics because of total-ionizing-dose and single-event effects (SEE). These are caused by the high energy electrons, protons, and heavy ions that are intrinsic to the space environment due to cosmic rays and the Earth's radiation belts. SEE due to cosmic rays and high-energy protons can lead to hard or soft errors in many types of devices and ICs. SEE are even possible in avionics and ground applications of advanced microelectronics with submicron feature sizes. SEE can cause failure at any point during a system's lifetime due to one inopportune particle strike, if circuits and systems are not suitably designed, tested, and built. Total dose effects accumulate over a system's lifetime, and can lead to premature performance degradation and system failure."
There are some interesting links on this at the Sandia Labs website here. Some of these go to sites that are a bit encyclopedic.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
But thinner vertically means it will be cooler and require a lot less power.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
When you get up to 10 Ghz, the distance is only 1 cm- and aren't your typical Pentiums and Athlons bigger than that?
So how fast can they realistically improve clock speeds before going back to the drawing board?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
It should be well shielded by a solid chunk of Aluminum on one side (heatsink) and a solid chunk of copper on the other (Motherboard Ground Plane). With a multi-layer motherboard (as they all are) the clock and high speed connections can be sandwitched between motherboard ground plane layers to prevent glitches (crosstalk) and meet FCC requirements. These are not high power transistors feeding a 5/8ths wave antenna designed to radiate a strong signal as a phone. They will be poor compitetion with a phone just like the 60 to 166 Mhz stuff of old didn't screw up your FM radio and TV channels much. FYI US TV VHF Low = 54-88 MHZ (ch2-6) FM band = 88-108 MHZ, Mid Band Cable TV A-I (ch14-36) = 108 - 156 MHZ. Interferance was slight and only in weak signal areas.
The truth shall set you free!
Very rude to reply to self, but I ought to.
The EPR gedanken experiment disproves _local_ hidden variables, there are non-local theories which are too confusing for me, have not been disproved. See the sci.physics FAQ for more info (there are sci.physics mirrors everywhere, but rtfm.mit.edu is a useful one to rememeber for access to any FAQ).
FP.
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Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Actually, academics have created 100GHz transistors out of GaAs. 10GHz isn't that great compared to these ultra-fast ones
However, the distinction may be that this is the fastest corporate-built transistor, and it might be the first semi-integrable one. I don't know the details of either development.
Maybe this is using Si? I forget the frequency limit of silicon, but this may be the fastest silicon transistor ever built.
A new year calls for a new signature.
It may max out at 10GHz or so.
However gallium arsenide, indium something,
have potential considerably beyond 10GHz and
are being used for high speed D/A and optical
connections. The problem with the non-silicon
stuff is they are harder to fabricate in very
high integration. They tend to be two or more
integration genrations behind CMOS.
IANAP (physicist), but I believe that there is some (albeit small) uncertainty with atom positions. I believe that tunneling of hydrogen atoms is how fracto-fusion works. Now, it may well be that it's greatly more probable with a hydrogen atom than a helium atom (and from what I understand, it's not too common with hydrogen atoms), but it does occur.
Never is too strong. There is a finite probability that it could. It might be so unlikely that it would occur, on average, once in 5 billion ages of the Universe, but it could happen.
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Very well worded ;-)
That's why I didn't mention them initially, as they're in that grey area at the edge of science.
They are inelegant, i.e. lack one of the qualities that appeals to the scientist in me. They also have been formulated in such a way that a simple mathematician such as myself cannot fully understand them, so I can't even make a judgement from a position of knowledge.
OK, OK, I'll admit it, I think they're a hack too!
FP.
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Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Offtopic, but while it is true in context voice recognition is the best approach, it would be possible to incrimentally analyze the sentence as it is being said, thus getting a rough guess at first to having it pretty much set before the last word is said. The last word would solely finish it off. It wouldn't be dead on voice translation, but at the end of the sentence, it would be "instanteneously" recognized.
As someone painfully familiar with grammars, I can tell you your absoultley right :) ...
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Note that I am not an expert in this area by any means and only have one (albeit very intelligent) person's expertise to argue from (and I know his position on this is not widely popular or accepted). I do know that EPR results in a paradox (I remember this much from my undergraduate degree in physics).
put them down somewhere, they randomly space shift somewhere else. i'll hafta remember that,
it's a good excuse.
Drach
And this is why to human translators with German trying to deal listening funny is.
Mnahhhhh, Intel will come out with a 10GHz processor about 2 weeks after Microsoft releases there next software release that makes your PIII 933 look like a 386/33....and at the rate of Microsloth, that should be in about a year or so after Windows 2000 Service Pack 9.
.kb
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
Well you stick something round the lead. Or something... And yeah, it would be expensive, but it would work. How much would it cost your business if data got corrupted randomly?
The P4 is not a total failure, it's like the Pentium Pro : no software can really show today what the core is capable of. That doesn't mean the core itself is worthless, just that some people need to recompile their apps...
The gap is on the energy scale not in "real space".
No, otherwise its probability would be 1. If you prepare a system that has a 10:1 probability to be in a given state (say, you send light and arrange for it to be polarized at about 70 wrt to an analyzing polarizer) and repeat many times the experiment of measuring whether it is in that state (send many photons and detect how many pass through the analyzing polarizer), you'll find it is one time out of ten on average (10% of the photons will get through).
Everything is radioactive. You, me, a lead safe, the stuff they make chip casings out of, and even CowboyNeal. If the material came from Earth, and wasn't specifically treated at Los Alamos or some other weapon's factory, it will have the same proportions of radioactive isotopes.
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Your physics seems rustier than mine.
/. and other places.
Large relative position uncertainty like you described only applies at the sub-atomic level. An entire atom has a predictable position in space and time. Need practical proof? Who has not seen the single-atom logo etches IBM and other research departments have been showing over the last decade? Or how about the nano-machines that are just a few atoms thick reported here on
Don't worry, your dinner table will never re-materialize a meter from where you were about to set your macaroni.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
But at a subatomic level, it's already dettermined which way the light will be polarised. It's like tossing a coin, you think it's random but at the atomic level it's predetermined which way it goes.
What's commonly known as probability is just how likely something is to happen in a large sample, not how likely one thing is. It's not the same thing.
The gate oxide is 3 atoms thick. The gate oxide is just the insulating layer between the channel and the gate. It's only one *part* of a transistor (the smallest one). You can see a schematic of a MOSFET here. The gate oxide is the yellow structure. Obviously, the transistor is larger than the gate oxide.
Also, in order for the connects to function as an antenna their length has to be of comparable size of the radiation wavelength, which is 3cm for 10 GHz (not taking into account the dielectric constant of the surrounding material). Anyway, 3cm is much larger than typical connects on the die, so they won't be efficient antennas. Connections on the motherboard will be more problematic though.
By 9.999998% pure, you mean that 9.999998% of your atoms are of the correct elements (Gallium and Arsenic). What element an atom is depends on its number of protons (which gives the charge of nucleus) - Ga has 31 and As has 33. Atoms of the same element may have different numbers of neutrons and hence different masses - these are known as different isotopes of the element. E.g. carbon (6 protons), can have 6 neutrons and a mass number of 12 or can have 8 neutrons and a number of 14. Different isotopes may be stable or decay at different rates. E.g. carbon 12 is stable, whereas carbon 14 decays with a half life of about 5000 years.
Seperating different elements is relatively straightforward (though getting anything 9.999998% pure probably ain't that easy) since they will have different chemical properties. Seperating different isotopes of the same element (e.g. to make uranium with mostly U235 which is the stuff you need for bombs) is more difficult since all you have to work with is the small difference in mass between the isotopes, so you might use a centifuge or some kind of diffusion based process.
Removing the radioactive isotopes from your lead to make non radioactive lead would need processes similar to those for producing weapons grade uranium, rather than producing pure GaAs (which will contain Ga and As atoms of a mixture of isotopes).
ibm had devolped a way to make them one atom thick.. involvinggrroved channels and what not..i dont remeber them actually trying it out...
hey i was wondering if you could show me some place where benchmarks of G4's outperforming intel/amd chips are? not to say i dont believe it..jus that i would like some proof of it
Three atoms thick? Wow. That seems to be pretty much the end of the line in terms of standard chip technology. Maybe they should start working on making the atoms themselves smaller...
The manufacturing cost of weapons grade fissonables has little to nothing to do with the cost of said material.
1. Consider the artifical scarcity. President Carter signed an executive order that specificly disallowed reuse of fissonable fuels because it would lead to weapons grade materials. US nuclear energy has never recovered. Perhaps the world is a safer place.
Consider the storage costs. My university recieved fissonable materials for free, and now can't afford to store them or dispose of them.
The "cost" is *not* one of manufacturing.
See http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/294779.html for some research at Stanford on technology that especially applies to building very fast switches. This is standard CMOS at 50 Ghz. The researcher used to work for Intel on the Pentium chips -- I can remember when he was working on trying to break the 1 Ghz barrier... Not sure if the record has been broken, but he told me a few months ago that he had made the fastest processer to date, which was 20+ Ghz. He said built a radar with it...
Mispredicted branches also cause a significant performance drop with pipelining. The CPU doesn't know for sure whether or not it's going to branch until the branch reaches the end of the pipeline. Until then it has to more or less guess based on previously results (or in the simpler case, just always predict "taken" or "not taken") and, if the prediction is determined to be wrong, it must clear out all the partially executed instructions.
Another performance hit is loading data and then attempting to immediatly use that data. Since the load operation takes a couple cycles (memory is relatively slow compared to a CPU), the operation that wants to use that data has to be stalled, creating a gap of a few null cycles between the load and that operation. It's not as bad as a mispredicted branch, but it can be avoided by a smart CPU/compiler combination that places the load operation a few instructions earlier and then works on other stuff while it waits for its results.
Pipelined processors are nifty stuff. It's surprising how conceptually easy a simple one is.
And on a random sidenote, my epiphany on pipelining came when I realized that it's kind of like a fast-food drive-through with multiple windows. A given customer may have a higher latency (because they have to go through that whole start/stop, start/stop non-sense), but the throughput is higher, which sounds like it's only benefiting the store at the cost of the customers. But then I realized that the higher through-put meant that there was less of a backup of people waiting, which benefited the customers. Of course I'm still trying to figure out the corollary for a mispredicted branch. I one day hope to be driving by only to see a little guy in a bulldozer pushing cars out of the line. Then my life will be complete.
I don't know about the rest of you, but until I see an intel announcement I won't believe it. Makes you wonder...if they have a process capable of .03um and 10GHz, why couldnt they get p3's above 1.13?
Maybe there is some validity to this claim...perhaps they have theoretically shown that it could work...but i doubt they will have the capability of making it happen by 2005.
Maybe you are referring to the "hidden variables" interpretation, which is quite controversial and almost debunked.
In fact it's proven entirely incorrect by the avent of Bell's theorem testing experiments. Hidden variables theories obey a particular inequality known as Bell's inequality which is to do with the probability of correlations between two entangled particles. Quantum Mechanics violates this inequality, and, as has been measured in several experiments, so does the real world.
If so, we'd need to think about employing a lossy grid of gates, so that a few failures don't kill the processor.
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IIRC, there have been 8GHz transistors (or mosfets) available for a few years now. Nowhere near that small, but they exist. I think this is more a publicity stunt from Intel, trying to claw back some custom from AMD.
Is it me or does this sound very similar to the article Intel Says 10GHz By 2005?
2005 is just too far away for me to get excited anyway..
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Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
My physics is a bit rusty, but if I'm not mistaken these 3-atomic layer thick transistors must have some problems because at this level the predictability of atom movement comes into play.
Every atom has a certain frequent movement. Objects consisting of a large number of atoms stay in one place because the movement of all those atoms combined adds up to zero.
Theoretically, it's not impossible that your dinnertable would suddenly be a couple of meters away from its original place. But it's the statistics that make such an event impossible in practice.
When creating objects very small - consisting of only a few atoms - the movement of every atom get's more important. Chances that the movement of one or more atoms influences the behavior of the object itself (in a way that its behavior is not predictable anymore) are a reality when creating transitors this small.
Therefore I'm amazed by the comment of the Intel scientist that these transistors behave just like other - bigger - devices.
A 10Ghz transister can only make a 10Ghz CPU if each pipeline stage (plus sync overhead) is only a single transister. Which is pretty impossable (a simple flip flop is several transistors, an adder is a big pile of them). As I recall the failed 500Mhz PowerPC that some compony like "eXponential" was making was thought to be extreamly aggressave with only 50 or so transitor delays between pipe stages (and some pipe stages were mostly wire delay to get the signals from one part of the chip to another!). Or maybe I'm confusing that with sombody or others barrel processer style MediaCPU (also out of bisness).
Tiny transistors are wonderflu. Tiny fast transistors are more wonderful. But 10Ghz transistors are no where close to letting you make a 10Ghz CPU. In fact it might be slower then current state of the art (but smaller). Something in this story doesn't add up.
It's amazing isn't it really. If you know that you've got no knowledge of the field, THEN DON'T TRY AND GIVE A TECHNICAL RESPONSE !!!!
"As our researchers venture into uncharted areas beyond previously expected limits of silicon scaling, they find Moore's Law still intact."
..
don't worry they are not going to roll out 10ghz tommorrow night
Intel realise that they are no longer the kings of the chip game. With their recent P4 release being a total failure, it is only a matter of time before AMD takes over their current position in the market. Releasing this kind of "news" only shows that they are simply trying to play the pr game, rather than actually focusing on proper R and D like AMD and Transmeta
This is the frequency band that mobile phones use (GSM 900) so couldn't there be problems with interference, and public hype along the lines of mobile phone radiation.
Also at these sort of frequencies you have to use microstrip waveguides to carry your signals, as standard wires don't work so good, so would interconnects and the like have to be redesigned?
Anyway, most computers are limited by memory bandwidth nowadays, and 10GHz chips only makes this worse. To get performance up a lot it would probably be better to improve the memory clock by a factor of ten than the raw processor speed.
Germanium (Ge)? Gallium arsenide (GaAs)?
You are correct that you can't have a semiconductor with only one atom. Even several atoms can't make it because in fact the energy bands (between which the gap is) are made up of many discrete states, each of which has a given energy. There are about as many of these in a band as there are atoms in the crystal. So, to get real (quasi-)continuous bands on each side of the gap, you need to have a macroscopic number of atoms.
Now, first, I didn't say that this IBM thing worked the same way as a semiconductor; I really don't remember the details and may very well be mistaken.
Second, these single-atom or three-atomic-layer systems are never isolated, they are always on a whole chip of their own, and this is going to have an energy-band diagram.
A one atom transister would imply that the atom IS a transister. I think not.
What the article says is that the transisters are 3 atoms thick and 30nm wide.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
And the transistors will get smaller and smaller as always. But for a transistor to work, electrons has to be able to flow through it, right? And it must be able to alter its conductivity as well. So how small can these transistors actually be? How would a transistor work if it was smaller than 3 atoms - or even smaller than 1 atom?
I wish that my brain could do SMP...
I trust independent research labs like Advanced Prototype Packet-Layer Engineering to do my benchmarks. They do quality work.
For more information, click here.
haha..nice i wonder though..when apple finally breaks 1 ghz will they still be faster then the 2 ghz chips amd/intel will be making
It could take years just to figure out the dynamics of this matrix!
I am a little confused by this 3cm number. I really don't know what I am doing, but if I were to calculate the wavelength of a 10 ghz signal i would need to know the speed it moved at.
If I assume it is pretty close to the speed of light, then the wave length would be... oh. never mind.
when apple finally breaks 1 ghz intel will be making the IA64, and this silly game is over.
-- Cure for Cancer instead of SETI! (only w32 yet - mail and beg)
Quantum physics applies on all levels, however, (unlike for Newton's laws) physical effects are not indepenent of scale; things on scales in which delta x* delta y is comparable to planck's constant behave way differently than things on larger scales. Having said this, a few atoms can be arranged so that the uncertainty principle is not significant (for computing). There is nothing in physics preventing this on a scale of a few atoms. Eg. an atom in a crystal is in the vicinity of its lattice site with a very high certainty.
In Australia 10.5GHz is acknowledged as being an ISM (even though it is not on the ACA chart - a quick phone call will verify this). SO instead of using a door opener to transmit data wirelessly, the CPU could be overclocked, whacked onto the end of a wave guide. Just like using the space shuttle to blow leaves, this would be an inefficient way to have a 10.5GHz carrier signal generator. But knowing our Government, a grant would no doubt be given to investigate this idea further, whilst the 15 year old kid with a working prototype of a cold fusion chamber is told to nick off and stop bother the local politician for funds.
C.Burgess - email:colvinb@airnet.com.au
IIRC the speed of electrons in copper is about 0.3c. But I have forgotten the source of that data though, so if you are trying to make useful calculations that data should be looked up.
Making flat structures (gates oxides) 3 layers thick isn't that hard. What's hard is to make them that thick over the whole wafer and to make a working transistor (they claim the latter). The lateral structures are 30nm which is approx. 100 atom layers wide. Reducing lateral structure size is a lot harder.
I am future man! I travelled 1 year into the future and picked myself up a nice 20 ghz processor for $50 bucks. My advice to all you humans is to wait a little while before you buy so prices can come down. And also get of carnival business.
Indeed, the more energy they have and the thinner the isolation between "wires", the easier it gets for them to "hop" over the latter. By then anything can happen, bits leaking from one memory cell to the next, calculation errors...
They may be on the right path, but the way to go is quite long.
The drift velocity of an electron in copper is about 0.0024 cm/sec . Drift velocity being the actual forward progress of a single electron.
Now, because the copper wire is full of electrons, if you push one in one side, a different one will pop out the other shortly thereafter. Maybe that is the 0.3c speed you were talking about.
At what speed orverclocking this chip will actually produce frequencies in the light range?
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Je t'aime Stéphanie
Depends. At what temperature are you making your experiment? In other words, how much energy do your atoms have?
Heat and watch...
Those have many atoms, they are at least on the micrometer scale and a single atom is about ten thousand times smaller.
OTOH, how about atom-beam interferometry? How could that be possible if atoms had predetermined positions?
Somehow I can't see how the speed of the transistors can help with the fact that you usually have to wait until the end of sentences before translating, you cannot just do it word by word.
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Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
They invented a transistor that does the same things as today's transistors, but is only three atoms thick?
That's really transparent aluminum!
Now is this comment worth something, or should I punch up the clear?
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Unless AMD gets to 10Ghz in 2004 in which case Intel will release a 10Ghz chip the next day, availability limited to 10 chips, half of which Intel will keep for developmental purposes.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
At most, your table might rearrange itself enough to let a couple protons through, although even that is highly unlikely.
/. already covered that story.
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?