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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...
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.
Even at today's high-end speeds (2GHz) 100 cycles (50nS) is fast for dram access. This is why keeping fast chips stoked these days requires heavy caching (L1/2/even 3 on-chip is a must and heading for 50% plus of die area)
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.
Almost makes you wonder if we'll move away from the 'big CPU, big whack of RAM' model to the 'bunch of little bitty CPUs, each with their own whack of RAM, and they do their own thing' model.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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
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$