Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
is in their ability to save power. From what IBM is saying, is that their chips can be run at say only 20 - 40 ghz and consume a hundred times less power then a chip built with todays processes. So you'll be able to get the same or more processing power out of these chips for less enegry.
At 110 ghz, a PHOTON only moves 2.7mm so figure that the actual signal propagation is like 2/3 the speed of that and you see that the signal can only travel 1.8mm in a clock. So, these chips are not going to be all that great for CPUs at 110 Ghz. Much better for signal processing likein routers or something.
Now I can get rid of my pot-bellied stove and start using my PC, lower emissions, more heat, and a space saver!
That means ~1.29mm at C (speed of light), so about 0.9mm in reality. Wow, those better be some short circuit traces!
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.
When in engineering school (a couple of years ago) my professor declared that we are moving towards the end of the speed and size improvements of microchips, because soon the assumptions aboout newtonian physics, on which circuit design is based on, will stop being reliable.
Usually you dont have to worry about quantumn effects (electrons tunneling and such things), because there are enough electrons to statisticaly average out the quantumn effects into the classical model.
But when you increase frequency you usually have to decrease the size of the components (so transistors switch faster). But if you decrease size too much you will not have enough electrons passing trough your circuit, to ensure the signal follows classical laws.
Well I guess the quantumn barrier was a lot further than i thought it was.
Or maybe IBM are not decreasing the size of their transistors but increasing voltages to make circuits switch faster.
Did you know that P4 has a couple of pipeline stages that do nothing but propagate signal? (yes, they pipelined the wire ...)
The Raven
The Raven
It is more than a transistor. The article at the NYTimes (I'm too lazy to link right now), said that IBM had previously anounced a transistor which could switch at 260 GHz and this anouncement is simply the next step, an entire circuit, but probably not a whole CPU.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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$
Okay, so I'm a real EE who design in IBM SiGe processes 5HP and 6HP.
1) IBM did demonstrate a ring oscillator.
2) These are IBMs latest SiGe HBT transistors, targetted for the "8HP" process. At present, 5HP and 6HP are in production and producing ICs - a lot of GSM cell phones will have IBM silicon in them. 7HP is coming on line.
3) Yup - these process are not directly for PC processors. The processes are targetted at RF, electro-optical, high speed data etc. They have SiGe transistors and CMOS. The SiGe is typcially used as a front-end, e.g. 10gigabit mutliplexers and laser driver/demultiplexors and diode detectors for optical links and the CMOS does the back end processing - e.g. line equalization etc.
In addition, this is not the fastest semiconductor circuit. For many years people have been using semiconductors at tera-Hz for microwave stuff (granted maybe not ring oscillators but certainly parametric-active amplifiers). I worked on 94GHz radar systems over 10yrs ago that used active semiconductors (IMPATT and Gunn GaAs oscillators).