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.

Comments

eh?

[The Uninformed]

"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?

speed is no longer the point

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:speed is no longer the point

[seanadams.com]

The solution here is simply to have CPUs sleep, i.e. run with reduced speed, or no clock at all after a few uS idle time until the next interrupt. Most chips are quite capable of switching to much lower clock speeds on the fly, but for some reason this technique is only really used in laptops. It only takes a microsecond to change speed, so there is absolutely no user-perceptible impact.

Also it is MUCH easier that doing a full "suspend" (powering down PCI cards and peripherals) because you don't have to reinitialize all that stuff when you wake up.

"Funny" moderation

[Boing]

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. :)

Re:Gamer Heaven...er Hell

[randyest]

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.

Re:Mmmmm...

[randyest]

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).

Re:Diamond to replace vacuum tubes??

[evilviper]

Any home audio freak will tell you nothing sounds like a sweet tube amp.

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.

There is both anecdotal and scientific evidence for the superiority of tubes versus semiconductors.

Please point me to any "scientific" evidence that tubes are superior.