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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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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?
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
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
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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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Everything else is holding these bad boys back. Inside the friendly confines of the CPU, the chips are speeding around at a GHz, but communications with the memory are in the hundreds of megahertz, and in a PC, the bus is pegged at 66MHz.
IIRC, they're hoping these processors will get up to 5 GHz
MHz are sexy. They make it an easy sell and a good jumping off point. Things like ops/sec, etc can get tricky because certain ops take longer than others.
To some extent it was Intel/AMD, to some it was Joe SixChip's lust for speed, to some it was code bloat. Personally, I feel it's time to stop worrying about processor speed for a little while and start worrying about memory speed. That's been an ever-increasing bottleneck, and our processors are starving for bits.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
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.
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.