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IBM Develops Transistor Capable of 210GHz
Homer Simpson writes: "IBM will announce on Monday that it has developed the world's fastest silicon transistor. They claim to have refined their silicon-germanium chip-manufacturing technology to produce transistors that are far thinner than existing ones. This will allow information to travel faster while using a lot less power. The new transistor can operate at 210Ghz (yikes!) using a measly milliamp of electrical current (80% faster than todays technology while using half the power)." Reader Geheimnis points out an announcement on IBM's site about this as well.
Sorry, but a milliamp is NOT measly. Imagine enough transistors to make a processor (10s of millions), and suddenly you've got in excess of 10,000 amps being drawn. Hoho, you think you've got power grid problems in CA now!
So a 20 million transistor P4 would draw 20,000 Amps? Or 66 kilowatts at 3.3V!? How much power did the Univac I use? Me thinks this mayhaps is not your general purpose transistor. aj
The 210GHz figure is the transistor's FT value, which is the frequency at which gain goes to unity or 0dB. The more meaningful number is the Fmax or 3dB frequency which is the frequency at which gain drops by 50% or -3dB below the maximum gain. The original IBM release lists 100 GHz as the switching speed - ergo Fmax.
Fmax, and not FT, is the maximum usable operating frequency for digital or analog design purposes. You must have some gain to do useful work!! For a single or dominant pole device, FT = FMax * GainMax.
SiGe technology is definitely the technology that may actually delivery GaAs-heads have promised GaAs would do for that last 30 years!
When you integrate a bunch of devices into a useful circuit, you don't come near to fT due to interconnect parasitics, process variation, and the margin that is allowed in order to make the process manufacturable.
More importantly, you'll need a hell of a refrigerator to cool a CPU made with these - 1mA/device might not be bad if you're building an 80GHz mux/demux, you aren't going to go and build a Power4 RISC with these tomorrow.
With this I can make my fridge turn off and on real quick!
Imagine a Beowolf[Sic] Cluster of THESE!!! Umm, wouldn't that be called a CPU?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
From the link:
:)
"This would permit feature-length movies to be stored as high-resolution digital video on a single compact disk."
That should keep the chip designers busy for a while playing catch up... :)
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
but don't ya think they might be holding back to do the fancy 300mhz 333, 375, 466 etc etc trick we have seen processors do in the past. What do you think?
I think that if they try to put out a processor today at 300, 333, 375, or 466 mhz, they'd probably get laughed at a lot. Unless it's some sooper-low power thing for a Palm Pilot or something.
Seriously, gHz is a lot harder to do than mHz, and there's not an infinite amount of room left for smaller feature size and faster clock speed. Sooner or later it's going to come down to a move to onchip or onboard parallelism. I don't see another 3 orders of magnitude in clock speed being pulled out over the next couple of decades the way it was done over the last two.
- jon
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Probably not as useful as running at about twice the clock speed, and having 8 CPUs on the module (two per IC, 4 ICs in the module). Plus the PDF render isn't that slow on a (no altivec) G3. I mean it's not stunningly fast or anything, but it isn't painfully slow...
FYI the POWER4 is a PowerPC, it implements all the PPC opcodes (like all the single precision FP that is optional in the POWER ISA). That doesn't mean the POWER4 does altivec though. IBM hasn't commented on way or the other on AltiVec.
I expect if the POWER4 has altivec Apple would be insane to not use it in at least their high end "server" level Mac. Even without altivec, it would seem to be a good idea to use it anyway... even if the price is so high few are sold it would still let Apple have one machine that beats many or all Intel CPUs out there. Right now, they could use that.
Let me clarify, they haven't commented on AltiVec for the POWER4. One could assume that because they commented negatively about AltiVec in the past that they wouldn't put it in the new CPU, but that's still not the same as hearing them say it isn't in the new CPU.
They haven't given out a lot of information on the POWER4, so it isn't surprising they haven't said anything about AltiVec on the POWER4.
I think you are probably right, there is a pretty big chance there is no AltiVec in the POWER4, but I do think there is a non-trivial chance that it does have AltiVec. After all they have a huge transistor budget, and it would for sure make the market for the POWER4 bigger (the RS/6000, and AS/400 markets are quite small, even compared to the Macintosh market, maybe even compared to the high end Mac market)
Actually a few more google searches, and I found IBM has licensed AltiVec, no news on whether they are going to put it in the POWER4 though.
It requires a huge transistor budget (like double for two cores), and provides less gain then SMT. It is way simpler to design (and I assume debug) then SMT. FYI, the POWER4 may be both multi core and SMT, some MPR reports implied that it was, nothing explicitly stated it though, an nothing later denied it. It will be interesting to find out about both SMT and AltiVec. And real speed numbers.
Consumers won't really care if a machine is fast because it has AltiVec, or because it is clocked fast, or because it uses a temproal distortion field to speed up time inside the case.
They just care that the thing is fast. So if a POWER4 Mac ran faster then a G4 Mac (including AltiVec optmised code) they will be happy. If it runs some stuff faster, and other stuff slower, well, I would expect them to be quite unhappy, esp. given how costly the POWER4 is likely to be.
I doubt it. For one the POWER4 isn't a G4. IBM already makes G4s, so this would have to be a G5 or something. Second the method Motorola recomends is looking at bit 6 of the MSR, if set AltiVec is supported, if clear there is no AltiVec. Apple doesn't seem to promote a method (or it takes more then 5 minutes to find it), however if your application uses bundles it can be set up to runtime link with it's own altivec or non-altivec libs depending on whether the CPU supports AltiVec or not (there are other machine dependent runtime link things it can do).
I would be shocked if IBM set bit six of the MSR wrong.
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Let's see... 42 Million transistors in the Pentium 4, for example. 1 milliamp PER transistor... That works out to 42000 amps for a 210 GHz CPU... Piping hot! Did they mean Microamps (that would put you at 42 Amps - high, but possible, especially at a low voltage)?
210 GHz is nice and all, but what does it overclock to? Hell, a bigger fan and a bit of thermal gel and I bet I could get it to 280 GHz!
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
I read it yesterday in the shower. No, I won't explain how I managed to keep the magazine dry -- the solution contains a lot of quantum theory and wax paper and other complicated stuff)
And vaseline. The solution also contains vaseline. But don't switch hands. Vaseline will dissolve the soybean based ink on the lovely pictures of the big machines.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
A couple things that are important to note about SiGe when I was talking to some colleagues today...
1. As far as I know, you can't make CMOS out of this stuff. This process makes BJTs (Bipolar Junction Transistors).
2. This is primarily for fiber optics, as they say.
I think.
Multiple-core technology is fantastic and i can't imagine why motorola isn't using it yet.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I'm really still incredibly confused by what's going on in the wierd little apple-ibm-motorola triumverate that is the PPC platform, but nearest i can gather Apple has been mostly having Motorola manufacture its chips exclusively for some reason, possibly (but probably not) that IBM doesn't like altivec and apple really needs altivec (because if you are going to be rendering the entire screen in PDF then having a powerful SIMD vector processing unit becomes really really helpful..). And according to some rather shady sources, Motorola has been having horrible problems with manufacturing-- which, if these shady sources are to be believed, can explain why the Mhz levels of the chips Apple has been using have stayed constant for a really long time now, and why there aren't enough 733 Mhz chips around to make dual 733 machines possible. So apple and motorola are just kind of wandering off to the side and getting lost while IBM sits alone in the corner and does really cool things with the POWER4 chips.
But, umm, this is just my interpretation of things based on the scant material i have read. I wish i knew how accurate i was.
Umm, but anyway, My question is this: What happens in the little PPC world from here? Does IBM just kind of keep doing its thing with the POWER line and toss Apple/Motorola some patent liscenses from time to time while Apple/Motorola stay alone and try to get their shit together, or are IBM's new metal technologies going to convince apple to start moving toward them? Or.. umm.. i don't even know what i'm saying anymore. OK, just, either way, will we be seeing improvements in apple's PPC line anytime soon, and does this new IBM announcement mean anything to apple customers? Or is this all irrelivant, because this is just one of these things where the technology not ready to move outside the lab, and implementation of this technology in production chips is five years away at best or something?
Oh dear.. Uhhh.. i'm pretty sure just about everything i've said in this incoherent post has been wrong, but i'm posting it anyway in hopes that someone who is actually informed could step in and explain what is happening. That would be really cool :)
All i know is, i drool at IBM's chip technologies.. all of them, pretty much.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Note that this is only an 80% improvement. That means current transistors are over 100GHz. So why aren't processors this fast? Simple: The clock rate of a processor is the time it takes to do one step in the pipeline, not the time for a single transistor to operate. By breaking the pipeline into more steps, they can get the number of transistors that have to operate in sequence per step down. Based on the numbers here, it would look like we're at about 100 for a PIII, and less for a PIV.
the purpose for this transistor is primarily for embedded devices and cellular phones, not for desktops. So don't get your panties into a bunch over this announcement
No. He was infected by Intel. They even branded the "World's Most Common Warning Label" into his head, 'Intel Inside'. The doctors who removed the crayon probably removed the Intel Infection as well.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
You are talking about the package or you actually pried it open to look at the die?
One would think, that Ge transistors are the past. Remember, they only work till 90degC, while silicon can work till 150degC.
Could they ever produce military SiGe transistor?
If it consumes half the power, produces half the heat, that is not enough to make faster chips. If the ambient is 30degC, the heat flow between 150degC and 30degC (120degC difference) is twice as big as between 90degC and 30degC (60degC difference).
However, if they interleave Ga and Si layers so that the doped Ga regions cannot difuse and spread under high temperatures, they have a chance to make faster ICs at the same temperature range as with monolitic Si substrate.
I doubt they will make it any soon. GaSi will not make faster processors for long, long time.
The RISC (reduced intruction set chip)approach to processors is takes the 'KISS' (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach. This means that instead of having to deal with huge amounts of complexity, as in a CISC (complex instruction set chip), time can be better spent improving the processor. Such improvements include speed and technology of the chip.
;-)
Now the Altivec, IMHO, is very much a temporary solution, since by the time processor clockspeed hits 1 GHZ the advantage will be minimum. If it is only a remote possibility that Apple will see the light now, and chuck out Altivec, they would be mad to leave it when the PPC goes 64bit.
Another thing worth mentioning is that graphics card probably duplicate what Altivec is trying to achieve anyhow.
Don't get me wrong, I am a content Mac user, though there are certain realities that must be faced. Now if I could only replace my current G4 processor with something from IBM
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
What about us web developers? All your Recordset's are belong to us! mwaahaaahaaaaha(smack...)
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
What is the max of the P4 and Athlon 4s?
Will mhz always be the speed meeter? What about ops per second and such? We can engineering and breakthroughs rate a processor rather then mhz's.
Who got started the mhz war? wan't the AMD 386 DX 40 the first mhz machine that sparced it all off? After all with wintel a 386sx16 with 4 megs of ram was the shiznat. Then we came up with DX2, DX4 and whatever else.
hundreds of gigahertz.. thats just nuts
So I get it! How about we reconfigure the solar matrix in parallel for endothermic propulsion!
We'll do that!
:-)
IBM is an awesome hardware/research company. Too often people get down on them for their poor marketing or whatever, but their research is second to none in my eyes.
I still remember when GMR hard drive technology was announced by them and the press release said "Drives of up to 100 gigabytes would be possible with the technology" and I didn't believe it, just seemed like more vapour and claims.
Then those drives just started showing up around 8 months later. I hope the same thing happens with this new fab. tech, even if it's only for improved power consuption to begin with.
High speed circuits like modern CPUs does indeed use BJTs, but obviously not exclusively. BJTs have the disadvantage of a low input impedance which is what causes higher power consumption. However they offer far higher drive strenghts so they are nice for driving highly loaded nets like pads, buses og clocks.
Also extreme high speed dynamic logic will often use BJTs on their driver stage.
However one should make sure not to confuse max frequency of a transistor with the maximum clock rate supported by a technology/design. While related they are certanly not the same (and the lattter depends on a whole additional set of factors like capasative loading threshold voltages, logic depth etc.)
It also looks like bullsh*t to me.
So, exactly, what part set off your BS detectors? (Not that you have any reason to believe this, but I do transistor-level CMOS design for fast reasonably fast circuits -- about 3 Gb/s I/O -- and it's all pretty standard stuff.)
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
So how many f-sub-tau Ghz do curent 1Ghz clock speed processors have? It's difficult to see how much of an improvement this is if you're not an engineer.
That depends a good bit on how much power you're willing to burn. The transistors in current-generation processors (~1.5 GHz clocks) run with Ft in the 10-20 GHz range. The harder you push the limits, the more stages you need to get the same result so the power goes up from architecture, and you also get some second-order effects from having both P- and N-channel devices on at the same time. IOW, process improvements alone won't help the power all that much except by reducing capacitance and supply levels.
Keep in mind that the IBM devices are bipolar, not CMOS. They operate with a continuous current draw of 1 mA per device. A current-generation processor has tens of millions of devices, which would add up to thousands of amps. You had better have one HEROIC thermal design to deal with that little problem. That, or only use thise suckers very judiciouly.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Seriously, I know we are a bunch of nerds around here, but I think the only people who understand this are the engineers. Did anybody try running this through BabelFish :)
Oooooohh!
Somebody, PLEASE?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
At the speeds these little sweeties work, there is no such thing as digital. (Actually, there's no such thing as digital, period, but at low speeds you can squint and pretend.) The 210 GHz number is what's called the Ft (that's f-sub-tau) or unity-gain crossover frequency. At 210, the device takes as much power in as out, so an amplifier chain loses everything above that.
In practice, you need quite a bit more than unity gain. So you operate the thing down in the 50 GHz region as a front-end amplifier and demultiplexer for OC-768 fiber interfaces, which are currently ruled by indium-phosphide devices. IBM is the only outfit with a SiGe process that plays in this game. The advantage isn't in running the whole bag at outrageous frequencies, it's in running the front-end and back-end at the high rate and being able to put low-power, low-speed CMOS (low-speed=3.125 GHz or so) on the same chip.
HTH.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
You seem to ignore that many people that bash MS for bloated code,
1) are too busy 2) aren't being paid / don't have the finances 3) don't have hundreds/thousands of the 'best' programmers from around the world working in parallel
Now, if you ignore these facts, your arguement might be somewhat convincing. I'm not sure if you've ever written any code before, but contrary to pop culture belief, a single person can NOT write enough functional, non-bloated code in a year to produce 10 megs worth of binaries. Let alone the 800 megs or whatever the minimal Windows install is nowadays.
I'm sure there would be a lot of people that would complain a lot less if MS products would do the same thing every time. Even crash in the same manner. But they don't. I'm constantly fixing MS products at work simply because the user's config changed, or this or that file is 'missing'... And it's not like these people have Admin access on their computers, either. (Heaven forbid!)
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~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Why is Homer Simpson submitting articles about IBM breakthroughs? He works for Intel.
No, Homer Simpson was the CEO of Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net but his company was bought out by Bill Gates which makes Homer an employee of Microsoft, not Intel.
130.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The point is that the faster a transistor is rated to go, the smaller these capacitances, and the higher the unity-gain frequency.
These have nothing to do with the MOSFET transistors used in conventional VLSI CMOS digital circuits, like processors. Although they could make something like the old TTL or the fast ECL with these transistors, I seriously doubt you will see much in this way any time. Both TTL and ECL are FAR faster than CMOS made in the same feature-size, their high power-dissipation made heat-sinking a severe problem for VLSI. Although Bipolar ECL did find some limited use in the LN2-cooled supercomputer market (they have essentially no dynamic power-dissipation, but they have a fairly high static power-dissipation, so they get *QUITE* hot).
On the other hand, this is quite likely to end up in all sorts of fun communcation and signal-processing applications.
Take apart a couple of core routers and you'll find stuff like that.
Rod Taylor
I was over at ABCNews.com and saw a similar article. In this article, "Jeff Welser, manager of high performance semiconductor technology at IBM, says chips using such strained silicon transistors will be 35 percent faster than chips using similar-sized, non-strained transistors." strained transistors is what they are calling the slimmer transisters.
IBM says they can roll out there by 2003 because new assembly lines wouldn't be need to actuall put the transistors on the chips. Apparently new technology is needed for the underlying silcon-germanium that "stretches" the transistors by forcing them to conform to it's shape.
The article also talks about Intel having created a a smaller transistor. It's 20-nanometers in size, and that's "500 times narrower than a strand of human hair, or about 30 percent smaller than the current fastest transistors being researched". They say you could fit ipto 1 billion on a chip the size of a P4. According to the article a P4 has 42 million transistors on it. This technology will take longer because INTEL has only been able to make a few of these on a chip. They are estimating 2007.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Everyone here is talking about processors and video chips using these new transistors. Unfortunately, according to the article:
The first chips to use the new technology will likely be networking chips that help guide data on and off of high-speed fiber-optic lines.
The high speed chips are really needed in networking just to push data out onto the buses, higher bandwidth means fewer bus lines. I don't think you will see this technology until Pentium X or so. If you think about it, Intel wants to sell their 5 Gig chips before they sell their 210 Gig chips, it makes better business sense.
Now, can someone build a PCB to get the signals to the optical transceivers?
You're quite off. I get around 10 years, so 2011.
And to think that I bought a 1.4 GHz computer THIS MORNING, and its out of date in 3 hours.
Caveat Lector: I am not a chip designer; this is probably wrong. But if overshoot won't explain himself, someone else ought to try.
At the speeds these little sweeties work, there is no such thing as digital.Transistors don't really send 1s and 0s, they allow current to pass through (or not). As you flip them on and off more quickly, things that used to look like square waves (digital) begin to show their sine wave (analog) roots.
unity-gain crossover frequency. At 210, the device takes as much power in as outIf I'm reading this correctly, F_tau seems to indicate how fast you can "overclock" an individual transistor and still get a usable signal out of it.
In practice, you need quite a bit more than unity gain. So you operate the thing down in the 50 GHz regionSince real-world chips contain lots of transistors in a row, you need to slow it down enough that you can get a usable signal all the way from one end to the other.
front-end amplifier and demultiplexer for OC-768 fiber interfaces, which are currently ruled by indium-phosphide devices.OC-768 is a honking large optical backbone. It runs a whole lot of frequencies all at once (multiplex). In order to convert it back to something like plain-old-ethernet, you need to split the signal up again.
Indium-Phosphide is just a different compound to make chips from, like Silicon-Germanium, or Gallium-Arsenide. Apparently InP is the current industry standard for demulitplexers.
IBM is the only outfit with a SiGe process that plays in this game.By now the rest should make more sense. Assuming I didn't totally screw up. Overshoot?
I may be remembering this number incorrectly, but I believe in most circuits electricity travels about 2.6 x 10^8 m/s. A little bit less than the speed of light.
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Striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap, will be the leap ho
The transistor is different say..the transistors in a pentium 3. These are bi-polar transistors and unless these guys are wrong, it DOES use 1mA.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Great! Now I can stream better quality porn!
It was a joke, smartie. Radio Shack was never a reference in late-breaking technology, so I thought it would make for a wise-ass remark (which actually turned out to be lame and plain wrong).
You forgot "All your Base..." and it's now anoying variations: All your Megahertz? All your transistors? All your framerates? Pre-bitchslaps to them as well.
You're using her as bait, Master!
the 80% are of course correct. IBM designed heterobipolar transistors capable of up to 90GHz already at the end of 1999
Cheers, Peter
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
Every year, I hear half a dozen earth shaking announcements -- half of them from IBM -- of major flat screen breakthroughs that should be hitting the shelves in "a couple of years". Yet year after year we go on with LCDs that just get a little better and a little cheaper each year.
A major (say 2 order of magnitude) change in flat screen benefit/cost ratio would have a huge impact. With the evolutionary changes we have now, we'll get there in a decade or so, but where did all those "revolutionary" improvements go?
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Well, to be honest, electricity does not travel anywhere near the speed of light. If you look at the actual speed of the individual electrons in the wire, it is actually quite slow. What travels fast is the electric signal. You can think of the situation with a pipe full of water. If the pipe is full, and you start pumping water into one end, water will come out almost instantaniously on the other end.
So, let's assume that the electric signal goes at 2.6 x 10^8 meters/s (as the other poster mentioned). The amount of time you have given is about 4.76 x 10^-12. Multiply that together, and we get a distance of 1.24 x 10^-3 meters, or 1.24 millimeters. Given that the feature size of these transistors is less that 0.1 microns (micrometers), which is 1 x 10^-7 meters, you can see that the maximum distance it can travel in that short time is over 10000 (10^4) times as great than the distance it has to travel over the transistor. Thus it's quite possible to have a 210GHz transistor.
Save a life. Eat more cheese
So there I was, juggling apples and small animals, when I accidentally bit into the wrong one...
That will never happen.. Intel, and AMD would team up and sue M$ out of existance..
Not everyone deserves a 320i
Before anyone (probably too late) starts dreaming of a 210 GHz Pentium-class microprocessor, take that 1mA and multiply by 20 million (or some plausible number of transistors for a microprocessor). Even at 1 volt, that'd be 20000 watts... quite a bit more than you can get even on the 240 volt mains of a residential service. ... and it'd take one hell of a heatsink :)
Now if you wanted to build some nice little amplifiers and use 1 mA bias currents, that's make a lot more sense.
It's pretty impressive technology, but it helps to keep these things perspective and not equate the bandwidth of individual transistors with relatively large bias currents to the clock frequency of a Pentium-class microprocessor containing many millions of transistors.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
There are two basic types of transistors: bipolar junction transistors (BJT) and metal-oxide-semimconductor field effect transistors (MOSFET). The method of operation of BJTs and MOSFETs is quite different and both have existed for more than 40 years.
In general BJTs are faster but consume more power so are used in chips containing a few hundred to several thousand transistors. Check out the current draw per transistor - 1mA. If you had 10 million of these things in your Athlon, you would need a power supply capable of delivering 10kA! This IBM technology is a form of BJT technology so you won't be seeing it in your CPUs.
CPUs use MOS technology and it will be a while before a MOSFET clocks 210 GHz.
With all that fire power X Emacs will open in under a day... right?
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This
First - What is this going to mean to the current processor and bus speeds that are already seemingly "too fast" at 1.7 GHz?
Second - Will they do the same with this new discovery as they did with MCA? It's mine and no one else can have any of it.
Third - What will this do to their stock price tomorrow? (Ah, my sweet portfolio)
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Now maybe I can actually max out a GeForce3 card
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Speed good.....
Sleep Bad.
Caffiene Good
Sleep Bad.
While this is cool, it will be a long long time before we ever see any use out of this speed
I'm always a little annoyed when people trot out the "code bloat" firehorse. For one, have you seen the sheer number of things we do with our PCs lately? Don't you think at least a few of those things require a fair amount of low-level code services?
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
well... It will take a while before this appears in products. IBM probabaly had the building blocks for a 1Ghz processor back in 1989. It takes a while before Science and the Marketplace converge to make a product. Sometimes the technology is there, but it's too expensive. Sometimes the technology is there, but there is no product or market. More often than not, the market exists and the technology does not... :-)
Ah, a 200Ghz PowerPC 'SiGe'-4. Now if I can just hold off for five or so years...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
I remember doing characterization on standard cells a couple years ago. Really interesting job, I'd find the propagation times and edge rates of inverters, nand gates, flip flops etc etc... All this was done in software using circuit simulation tools.
Anyway, right before I left I remember characterizing 0.18 micron stuff. The inverters had edge rates on the order of 50 picoseconds (50 x 10^-12!!). That's how long a logic transition (0 -> 1 or vice versa) takes. Propagation times took a little longer, but not much.
Of course, this all was back in early '97. This stuff just gets faster and faster. Btw- if someone needs a characterization engineer in the Seattle area let me know. It was pretty cool to be on the cutting edge of this stuff.
Anonymous coward answers: No, Homer Simpson was the CEO of Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net but his company was bought out by Bill Gates which makes Homer an employee of Microsoft, not Intel.
Not the way M$ does buisness :)
"just connect this to..."
BZZT.
Liberty.
Did you miss Alpha's dual cluster structure and P4's cross chip communication pipeline stages? You can pipeline everything... including simple transmission lines.
Probably RFSQ, which needs superconductance to work, Id hesitate of putting that on the same level as CMOS transistor technology (which this article wasnt about in the first place of course). HTMT does not stand for "Hyper Technology Management Threading".
Do they still make PowerPC chips. It would be great in a Mac.
Microsoft Announces Tighter, Faster Code For New OS Product
We've removed 50,000,000 lines of unnecessary code, says Gates, boots up much faster, uses less memory and far more stable, thanks to only focusing on needed code. Converting portions of Office from PL/1 and Cobol also noted as helpful...
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All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Interesting point, but you have completely overlooked the transwarp conduit in the flux capacitor.
Seriously, I know we are a bunch of nerds around here, but I think the only people who understand this are the engineers. Did anybody try running this through BabelFish :)
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I've seen it on star trek, they have super mad faster processors than just 50ghz, so fast you can render real time VR that looks lifelike!
"Pussy: You spend 9 months trying to get out of it, and the rest of your life trying to get back in..."
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You maybe interested to know (I found out in 1998, so it could be an old slashdot topic) that this is by no means the fastest processor tech. I have heard of. While I applaud IBM in their constant innovation, this is nothing compared with the TCAP chip, developed by ACC. TCAP stands for Transfer CAPactitor, and supposedly this was backwards engineered from an alien craft (Roswell, supposedly!). I mean, they couldn't get a patent because supposedly that would go against the "Outer Space Treaty", or something. Anyway, not that I believe in aliens or anything,I couldn't care less where the tech came from (People say that the transistor came from alien tech. too, but I know that is rubbish, it is just two diodes stuck together, and as the diode was invented over 70 years ago, I can't believe that myself!), but it is supposedly possible to push it to 12-terahertz of speed, and, in my mind, is the future of processors, no matter how far they try and push transistors like IBM have tried to do. Try the following links for more info: http://byamerican.com/abouttcap.htm or just search on the net for ACC or TCAP. Sorry if the majority of people have already heard of this, but it makes this IBM tech seem less like a revolutionary tech, and more of a stop-gap.
The bozo has spoken!
So how does this differ from Intel's annoucement that they will reach 20GHz by 2007? Intel says their chip will be .2 micron, IBM says their chip will be 1 milliamp. Is IBM going to try to make end-user processors with this? Are we going to see any real numbers before they do anything real with the technology?
They *did* rewrite the OS from scratch, that's what NT is. And most code at Microsoft was C/assembler back when they did Word. I love people who bash MS software as 'bloated' but can't produce anything themselves which is nearly as functional. And when they add the features, it is just as 'bloated'. I'm not saying we can't berate MS for slow-ass products that suck, but it's usually because they are supporting a massive user base with diverse functionality needs, not because they 'wrote Word in BASIC' or some other asinine idea.
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Where can one find one of these 40GHz chips? I'd like a few
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
The only applications that will really use the kind of power (oh yeah and Windows XXXP too).
Nobox: Only simple products.
A fiber-optic bus would be l33t.
I don't think if it would actually work, since electricity would power the light . . . but I am no physicist.
What is a Beowulf cluster?
It's gotta be either a breakfast cereal, or a chocolate bar, right?
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(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
Scientific American has this bitchin' article about supercomputing going on right now (i read it yesterday in the shower. No, I won't explain how I managed to keep the magazine dry -- the solution contains a lot of quantum theory and wax paper and other complicated stuff) -- part one this month and part two the next. Besides all the boring facts about trans-petaflop computing, there was a quicky about a transistor that hit 770 GHz...but, it might have been optical (it was on the same page touting optical switching at 10 gb/s for one cable vs hundreds of strand of steel and megawatts of power for the same accomplishment). Either way, that's three times IBM's number. You should check out the article anyway (it's not online, but every slashdotter should have a subscription to Sciam), since it has a lot of information on new technologies in supercomputing, including Hyper Technology Management Threading (a nice way to maximize current silicon to avoid halt cycles on billion dollar computers). It also runs a quick comparison of current megaprocessing techniques, including nods to Beowulf Clusters, Distributed Computing eg SETI and task specialized chips.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It's nice and all that a processor can go up to 100 GHz+, but how will you ever get the info there on time?
Motherboards nowadays have memory running at 133 MHz and I doubt they could go much faster.
I myself have a PIII 450 MHz on a 133 MHz bus. For every memory cycle, the CPU does 3.38 cycle. That's reasonable. Nowadays a PIII 1.4 GHz is nearly standard, that's a factor 1:10.5! And a 210 GHz would be 1:1052!!!
I know that the on-board cache will help close this gap, but most programs nowadays just don't fit in cache, not to mention fitting in memory. Isn't it true that most CPU's nowadays are ilde; just waiting for info to come?
P.S. I've noticed time and time again that if you run Picosoft Winblows, not the CPU, not the memory, the hard disk determines the overall speed.
The development that finally breaks Moore's Law? It seems like it could because it is a substantial increase in speed.
When you apply Moore's law (processor speed doubling every 18 months) you'll find that we won't be hitting 210GHz until July 3th 2022.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Firstly, the power consumption is way too high. 1 mA * 1 million (a ridiculously small number of transistors for a CPU) = 1000 A !!
Secondly, the article says nothing about the size of the transistor, so you can assume it's pretty big, at least compared to the transistors in your typical CPU.
Thirdly, the article compares these babies with InP and GaAs technologies. These are both very fast technologies where the transistors are big.
Lastly, fiber and cellular systems are listed as typical applications. These are applications with relatively low integration densities (English: big transistors) where high speed is more important than anything else.
So don't expect to see this technology used in a CPU.
IBM licenses their processor tech to other companies. Already both AMD and Intel are using IBM's copper interconnect technology, so I doubt that they'll sit on the transistor technology. It's more profittable to own a patent and license the work out to others than to do the silicon work yourself, hence companies like Rambus
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
after they got their buts trimmed by AMD. The next slashdot article on Intel will read" Intel doubles Itanium" by end of 4th quarter! EXTRA EXTRA...
You know the Microsoft destroys the night, Linux devides the day...
That's 5x200, not 1x1000. It doesn't take 1/5th the time to execute an instruction on the cluster, but it can do 5 at once. If you put an extra lane on the highway, would it increase the speed limit to 110?
Good Point. I too have an AMD K-6 at 300 mhz. My brother has a k7 Athlon at 650 mhz and I don't see that much difference. Future apps will be fatter and gobble up that clockspeed. I keep saying: Clockspeed is not the issue. Peripherals, memory speed, hard drive access. All these things are still slow. Speed up the bottlenecks there and maybe we will have faster computers.
Isn't it funny how the article says 210 ghz consumers expect 100ghz in two years... huh I realize that 210 probably wasn't that stable but don't ya think they might be holding back to do the fancy 300mhz 333, 375, 466 etc etc trick we have seen processors do in the past. What do you think?
***I GOT NUTHIN***
2 processors of that kind of speed in my workstation, and I might actually be able to render something of FF's quality within my lifetime ^_^
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"Look. Endsville is burning." -Mamimi, FLCL
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I wonder how much this new transistor technology will speed up the various kinds of RAM we use. Offhand I'd guess that SRAM, being largely logic-based, will keep up, but DRAM, relying as it does on capacitors, may not. If so, the CPU/memory speed imbalance that new technologies like DDR are trying to address (no pun intended) will get a lot worse.
ok...no
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FIND ZEEE MONKEY MANGO BEFORE HE TAKES OVER THE WORLD
Forgive my naivete, but it would seem that IBM's latest SiGe transistors (the switches) pairs perfectly with their copper-wiring chip technology (the interconnects) to produce a very formidable leap forward in the entire chip's functionality. The question, of course, is how IBM plans to make money from these innovations. Will they license the technology to the likes of Intel and Sun, or will they use it themselves 'til the patent runs dry? I don't know; what do you think?
>SLAP<
>SLAP<
m00.
First post mentioning 'A Beowulf cluster of those things'
FPS in Quake if Invidia uses IBM's new technology
Personing mentioning that faster CPU's are useless since everybody is just surfing AOL and writing email anyway.
First person mentioning anything related to SETI@Home or distributed.net
Have a m00 day.
m00.