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IBM Creates World's Fastest Semiconductor Circuits
Todd Heidesch writes: "'IBM announced it has created the world's fastest semiconductor circuit, operating at speeds of over 110 GigaHertz (GHz) and processing an electrical signal in 4.3 trillionths of a second.'
IBM expects the new technology to be pumping out 100 gigabit/sec network switching chips by the end of the year (on an optimistic schedule, I presume)." dr_zeus contributes a link to this Reuters article running on Wired (also fairly thin) on the release, writing: "Granted, this isn't a PC chip, but one wonders how long it will be before we hear 'dude, you've got a 110GHz Dell!'"
Dude, your 110GHz Dell consumes 450kW, and requires its own diesel generator...
The cover has 3 desktop machines 'burning rubber' and racing towards a finish line. The title is something like "Breaking the speed barrier, Intel 386 33MHz!"
It's a neverending journey, this technology trap we find ourselves in.
Now I can get rid of my pot-bellied stove and start using my PC, lower emissions, more heat, and a space saver!
And Steve Jobs will still claim that his 2 Ghz G6 is "twice as fast" on some obscure benchmark.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
At 110GHz, light travels less than 3mm in one clock cycle -- less than the width of the processor, I presume. And if it's accessing memory from a RAM chip 10cm away, it'll be waiting close to a hundred clock cycles to get anything back.
That's okay - the CPU justs plays Solitaire until the RAM gets back to it. (A little eensy weensy microscopic solitaire game.)
Hopefully Steven won't be around for the occasion.
Somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting.
Dogbert was hired as a consultant to name the company's brand new product. He said that he had a computer combine the best words from astronomy and technology. The result? "Uranus-Hertz." It was banned from at least one newspaper.
I'll buy a Dual G6 110 GHz powermac, you'll be left with the Dell Pentium 7.
The Pentium 7 6.9 GHz has 1000 instructions in it's pipeline and also features "predictive stallman" to cope with the microsoft software ban.
Ever since microsoft lost it's source code rights, RMS has had windows under GPL. Stallman has now got a hardware function in the Pentium 7 which checks for GPL licenses in the binaries.
This has led to millions of professional windows users switching to Mac OS XI to avoid the limitations of a GPL system.
Not even President Al Gore can convince america in the benefits of windows GPL, intel is dying and nobody gives a damn anymore.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
OK...
Correct me if I am wrong but aren't we limited by the speed of electrons at some point in the near future. How far can an electron travel in one second? How does this affect die size?
Sure, anyone can shake a stick 110 billion times per second but this doesn't mean that the stick will do anything productive.
As a side note, I think that it would be ironic and appropriate that Intel name their 4.7Ghz chip the "PentiumXT" as a funny play on the AthlonXP and the 1000 fold improvement over the 4.7Mhz XT processors of yore.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
they will remove circuit that allow to overclock these babies! Just as Intel and AMD did! Can imagine what THG or Anand will say...
Seriously people, methinks it some sort of error there, somebody put too many zeroes.
Dear Diary,
Life can be hard if you're a 110GHz computer. It wasn't until my 3.168x10E15th clockcycle that there was a movement on the mouse and I had to present a password-requestor on the screen. That might look nice, but I had to wait several million of clockcycles before I got all the needed information from the memory. Memory is sooo slow these days, I recall stories from previous generations that you could have the data the next clockcycle after you had set the address! The downfall started when but right now it's waiting waiting waiting.
Fortunatly the password typed was wrong, so I had the fun of producing a beep for 44 billion clockcycles. It sounds an impressive length of time, but I got bored after about twenty million clockcycli and I changed the tone-height a hertz or two. That'll teach them to make these stupid mistakes!
Yeah... life is as good as you make of it. Hmm... an interrupt. Hold on. Back. Well, 80 clockcycles for that... Stupid optimized code. How much more before we get another timer-interrupt? Aaargh, still more than 80 billion clockcycles...
bash$
I see lots of EE types checking in. I'm no EE, not even an E, though I've got a serious affection for DD's anytime I see them and my feet are EEEE wide.
You guys who are saying this is impossible or impractical are in for some real egg on your face, though it's hard to say when.
I managed to spirit one of these out of the IBM labs and they are fast! In fact, they're so fast that you've got to start them up tomorrow in order to do something today, which is ok, because, once they crank, they start delivering yesterday.
Very cool. I just had Isaac Newton help me with a couple of things. By tomorrow, I should be looking up da Vinci, unless I get careless and work my way all the way back to Pythagoras.
Of course, it's tricky staying one step behind the IBM guys. They came by for me yesterday, but I hadn't started up yet. They almost got me last month, but I gave 'em the slip the year before.
I'm so looking forward to upgrading my memory again...DDR 22000000 here we come!
Wouldn't mind having a 110ghz DSP coprocessor on my system, though. The thing could probably do visual recognition at that rate. Then again, I'm not sure I want the computer to see me in my underwear at 1am.