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NTT Verifies Diamond Semiconductor Operation At 81 GHz

Posted by timothy on from the ooh-shiny dept.

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.

18 of 510 comments (clear)

  1. Gamer Heaven...er Hell by Whitecloud · · Score: 5, Funny

    Should be able to run Doom III.... heh.

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    1. Re:Gamer Heaven...er Hell by Gherald · · Score: 5, Funny

      Perhaps it will. But the article doesn't have any any Quake III Arena FPS benchmarks!

      What's up with that!?

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  2. Geeks want to know... by serps · · Score: 5, Funny

    So, will these new chips be free as in speech, or free as in De Beers?

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    1. Re:Geeks want to know... by dakryx · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I remember a Nova special about manufactured diamonds and how GM finally got the large ones made with no defects. A trip from a Debeers exec and the operation was shutdown and people were released. Back to the industrial diamond business!

    2. Re:Geeks want to know... by GoRK · · Score: 5, Informative

      Negative; the GM operation was shut down because all they could produce cheaply with their hydraulic presses was diamond powder. They actually were to the point where they could make contiguous crystalline structures bigger than dust; however, the cost far exceeded that of the DeBeers extortion and international crime fee diamonds. Though GM abandoned the project for purely financial reasons, I'm sure that DeBeers was happy about it nonetheless.

  3. M$ Released new bloatware to slow it down... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    in other news, M$ released Windows 2005 beta to NTT. "With instant messaging, help characters, voice response mouse buttons, and background autopatching, the operating system still takes 10 seconds to load Word." says Jerry Chang of M$ product development. "We feel this is the sweet spot. Give us Moore's Law, and we'll give the same speed you got used to in 1993."

  4. Diamonds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "CPUs are Forever" is not conducive to Moore's Law.

  5. Finally! by maxmg · · Score: 5, Funny

    I can give my wife a new processor for her birthday! I can see it now:
    "But it's an 18 carat Intel, darling!" - "WHACK"

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    1. Re:Finally! by ewhac · · Score: 5, Funny

      Or, conversely, now you can reduce a man to tears with the gift of a diamond.

      Schwab

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  6. Memory? by Lord+of+the+Fries · · Score: 5, Funny

    So with all the problems we're having these days getting data (memory) near all of these cycles, I can't even imagine what the situation would be with a processor built around these kinds of speeds.

    I'm imagining something like Dante's level 7 cache or something.

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    1. Re:Memory? by aXis100 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Because you have to run those signals over wires, which do a really crappy job of conducting a high speed signal. On chip cache is certainly fast - just expensive (real estate and fabrication errors)

      At the sort of frequencies we're currently using, circuit tracks look more like inductors and capacitors than bits of wires. They essentially act as antennas, and there is a massive amount of effort spent in trying to avoid those effects.

    2. Re:Memory? by SteveAyre · · Score: 5, Informative

      One reason which another poster mentioned is the data transfer over the bus between the CPU and Main Memory, this is usually a few inches which means the signal can take more than 10ns to travel along the bus (which is a significant amount of time in chip design).

      Another reason is that SRAM is used in a CPU for cache - its VERY fast but takes up more silicon per bit and is very expensive per bit.

      Main memory is generally made of DRAM which is slower but also much smaller so you can get a much larger amount of memory onto a chip and much cheaper.

      It's not that the latest technology isn't used in memory, it's just that its very expensive so it's used within the CPU as a cache while main memory will be slower in order to balance space vs cost for the machine to still be both affordable and usable.

      Once the price drops, the cache technology gets put into main memory and a newer faster one replaces it in the cache.

      The other big thing is that most of the advances in CPU speed are not due to the chip tecnology but due to design, especially pipelining.

      CPUs go through a series of stages (eg fetch-read-execute) and the CPU can take advantage of this by running each stage while the next stage is still running.

      This trick can't be taken advantage of in memory as memory does not contain several stages - hence pipelining increased cpu speed by something in the region of 5-10x while not increasing memory speed at all.

      It's mainly new design tricks like this that have made most of the speed advances, which is why processor speed increases at such a larger rate than memory speed.

  7. speed is no longer the point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Hey honey! by Botchka · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can I borrow your wedding ring for the lan party??

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  9. Re:overclocking by aXis100 · · Score: 5, Informative

    81GHz is the switching speed of the transistor, not the processing speed of a resulting PC. Some of the reasons are:

    * CPU's perform a large number of transistor switches in a single clock cycle.
    * The rise/fall response time must be much smaller than the switching time.

  10. Re:Diamond to replace vacuum tubes?? by insane · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't be uninformed...oh wait this is slashdot. Vacuum tubes are still used in RF broadcasting, especially digital TV because the are able to reach the power levels necassary to broadcast a 50kW radio signal at low enough distortion to cleanly transmit the digital signals.

  11. Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? by endersdad · · Score: 5, Informative

    This lengthy article gives a fascinating history into how the DeBeers cartel has created artificial scarcity in the diamond market and convinced the western world that a "Diamond is Forever". Before the 19th century, no one ever had to spend 6 weeks salary on an engagement ring!

  12. "Funny" moderation by Boing · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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. :)