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NTT Verifies Diamond Semiconductor Operation At 81 GHz
Anonymous Coward writes "This story over at eetimes.com reports of a semiconductor made of diamond that is able to run at 81 GHz." Mmmm, foreshadowing.
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Good luck getting more than two of those chips, let alone a cluster of them.
Vacuum tubes still being used in production broadcasting... I did not know that...
Screed
"The diamond devices are expected to be in demand to replace with the vacuum tubes that are used in the high frequency, high-power applications such as receivers and transmitters at digital TV broadcasting stations."
Now why wouldn't they think people would use them in computers?
I forget where it was posted (Wired I think, I searched and couldn't find it), but there was a story posted about manufacturing 'fake' diamonds that have no defects and such, so the answer to your question is: Cheap as in Top Ramen. Also, if you have figured this out already - our 'speech' isn't really that 'free' anymore.
the next big ceiling in CPU design is electricity consumption. Nobody cares about it in PCs now, but when CPUs start hitting several hundreds watts, businesses and home users will be forced to take it into consideration or else be badly burned each time they open their power bill.
Making CPUs faster is all very nice, but the deciding point in purchasing an AMD vs Intel CPU in a couple of years may very well be in how much electricity it uses, even more so than how fast it is.
I noticed one thing... Anytime there's an article where nobody really understand the concept or the technology underneath it, for example like this one... And what did fellow slashdotters do? Crack jokes over it.. You guys are outrageous! ;-)
Will sys-admin for food
Okay, seriously moderators, it's time to stop moderating "diamonds are a geek's best friend" and "maybe now I can give my girlfriend a [heavy-duty graphics chip of the day] for our anniversary" as Funny. Every freakin slashdot article that mentions diamonds in any context has these jokes. That's what the "redundant" tag is for. :)
The fine article is not clear on this, just saying that they made "a chip" (which can be a lot of things.) In any case, I'm sure this isn't a x86 chip. Most likely a RF device. 0.2um in 3mm^2 aint much, definitely not enough for an x86. Not even a 286.
everything in moderation
Er, yeah, if you want a massive cellphone booster or something. This is definitely not a general purpose processor (CPU), 0.2um gates in 3mm^2 is insufficient density and area to make any kind of decent CPU (maybe an 8-bit PIC, which even a cluster of is weak by today's standards).
everything in moderation
Personally, I wouldnt care about authenticity, and neither would my wife if I gave her a rock twice the size for the same money.
Yes, right after they tell you how much better records sound than CDs, and that aliens are stealing their newspaper.
The fact is, people just like the sound of a tube more, because of it's distortion. It doesn't produce a better, cleaner, or clearer sound, it's just a sound some people like more. That sound, in fact, could be reproduced with a good DSP.
Please point me to any "scientific" evidence that tubes are superior.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There is a cheapskate Linux user, who just nukes the os and puts Debian on the $299 PC. Diamonds and the cartel will be broken by this tech. There is going to be one heck of a demand for synthetics, don't forget the diamond can deliberately contain impurities for the purpose of changing out put characteristics. It would be interesting to use slightly radioactive metals in the diamond formation or enery path to create secondary field effects, as well. We are on the verge of a breakthrough in wave signal technology at the atomic level. Just imagine a miniature electron microscope for 500 bucks! That is how important this tech is. Medical imaging tech from selected energy wave lengths could become cheaper. The down side is of course the scarry military applications, on the high output side of this tech. Buck Rogers shoot um up space weapons and Star Wars defence are not that far off. The computer applications are secondary. The international military establishments will not be able to resist the possibilities. The same way Hussein could not resist the crazed ex patriot American and Canuck Gerald Bull and his mega gun technology. I will take bets a certain Swedish arms manufacturer is looking seriously at creating a working battle field laser right now! The developers of US field weapons are most likely doing the same.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
"Actually, improvements like pipelining don't affect the maximum clock frequency of a microprocessor (the GHz thing) very much. What they do improve is the average ammount of processing work that can be done per-clock-cycle."
A 20-stage pipeline is one of the many reasons that the P4 runs SLOWER clock cycle-for-clock cycle than its predecessor or the Athlon.
A 3 GHz P3 will trounce a 3 GHz P4. But because of its design, the P3 can't scale very far beyond 1 GHz. The P4, on the other hand, still has lots of room to grow.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Is it just me, or are these international diamond cartels very, very nefarious organizations? They maintain their monopoly status by threats, murder and extortion...all the while sitting on stocks of millions of diamonds that they "release" to the public as demand sees fit. If it was any other commodity industry, diamonds would be 1/100th of the price they are now...but since they are "allowed" to monopolize them, we get this artificially inflated situation. And yes, I agree wholeheartedly that it is a tradegy that human behavior is twisted to the point that we "need" to have a piece of compressed African dirt on our fingers to feel love.
A few years, and bulk diamonds will be on the Home Shopping Channel.
I keep telling people and nobody believes me, but how they could have missed THIS Wired article is beyond me.
As if the HOT CHICK covered in CHEAP DIAMONDS wasn't enough to attract any geek, the mention of revelutionary cheap processors should have been like pheromones to the poor diamond clad lady. (She dare not show up to a lan party dressed like that...)
Anyway, the Wired article was mentioned here at Slashdot a few weeks ago, and I picked up a copy at the newstand to read at work. It finally looks like DeBeers is focked. Intel, AMD, and IBM, and Microsoft all have something to gain from this. DeBeers simply doesn't have the strong-arm capabilities to keep those four giants down.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
It's not a senseless bash against Windows. It's a legitimate concern that makes it difficult to use Windows for professional applications like audio production. It makes absolutely no sense to optimize for the eyes when the ears are much more sensitive to dropouts. If there's a momentary delay opening a menu, people won't notice that as much as their audio buzzing while the menu is opening.
A solution to the problem with music today
Although diamond-based semiconductors will have their applications, they won't replace silicon in most mainstream computing applications for decades. Consider GaAs, a semiconductor that is faster and better than silicon. It was hailed as the natural successor to silicon back in the 80s. Yet, this delightful material has yet to replace silicon in a host of speed-sensitive applications because it is too hard to work with in large dies. The manufacturability of dense speed, not pure speed, is the real issue -- can you reliably pack 100 million multi-GHz transistors on to a diamond substrate for under a $1000?
A secondary issue is that diamond is actually inferior to silicon in power consumption because it has a much higher band gap voltage (5.4 V vs. 1.2 V). This means that circuits built from diamond must operate at higher voltages and thus consume more power. You think your laptop gets hot now, wait til the circuits are all based on diamond. Only if diamond can be fabricated into smaller circuits with lower junction and trace capacitance and lower resistance in the traces could a diamond-based circuit operate with less power dissipation than a similar silicon-based one. We should not confuse diamond's superiority for speed and power as being a superiority of power efficiency
The bottom line is that it will take many many years and many billions of dollars of investments for diamond-based semiconductors to be economically fabricated in with the densities and low rate of defects found in silicon-based semiconductors. And diamond's high power consumption may prevent its use in many applications. Until such hurdles are overcome, diamond semiconductors will be a crucial for niche applications but silicon will enjoy its continued reign as the main material used in digital electronics.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.