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Frozen Chip from IBM hits 500 GHz
sideshow2004 writes "EETimes is reporting this morning that IBM and Georiga Tech have demonstrated a 500 GHz Silicon-germanium (SiGe) chip, operating at 4.5 Kelvins. The 'frozen chip' was fabricated by IBM on 200mm wafers, and, at room temperature, the circuits operated at approximately 350 GHz."
Several cell phones just run at real time. So they really do run at 2.4 ghz for the signal processor, while the system itself is on another chip at a different speed.
REmember even though it's running at 2.4 ghz it's extremely dedicated and doesn't produce a lot of heat.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
It's interesting, but wouldn't it be better to just use two of these chips at room temperature, rather than spend time/money/space on cooling the chip to 4.5 Kelvins?
Or have they just been fabricated to demonstrate that they can attain high GHz rates?
I think that's the point. Reading between the lines, this isn't about general-purpose CPU chips, this is about specialised signal processors. In other words, don't expect to be buying an Intel or AMD chip running at 30+GHz anytime soon.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I didn't read the article, but people don't seem to be making a big deal out of the fact that they are comparing the frequency at which a cellphone transmits data to the clock speed of a processor.
Similes are like metaphors
Well it is all frequency of electomagnetic pulses... but you are right the comparison is mighty strange.
It seems the linked article was writen (badly) for a non technical audiance by a non technical author... So why write about super cold and super fast processors?
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
By finding the last point on the temp/speed curve, they are able to much more accurately determine the entire curve. i.e. It's a lot easier to interpolate to more realistic cooling levels. And it makes for a cool headline too.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
Hrm... a batch of transistors that'll relay at clock speeds of 350Ghz. Then they tossed on their P4 cooler and watched it superconduct. Why am I not surprised at 500Ghz? At 4.5K, it's clearly superconducting. And the phone comparison... I like EE Times, but that writer needs to be shot. The editor deserves a slap on the wrists for letting it in (unless they're referring to some strange property of phones). "For the first time, Georgia Tech and IBM have demonstrated that speeds of half a trillion cycles per second can be achieved in a commercial silicon-based technology, using large wafers and silicon-compatible low-cost manufacturing techniques,[and absurd cooling that allows us to leverage the properties of superconductivity]" (fixed). IBM: Design it Today, Figure out what the hell we're going to do with it 7 years from Tomorrow. (And yes, I'd get a microprocessor designed with these ubersistors).
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
Its all good......until you hit the bus.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Because cold due to vacuum is different than cold due to liquid He.
You do know that jokes are meant to be funny, and don't have to be factually accurate, right?
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I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
From TFA - my emphasis
IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) and Georgia Tech (Atlanta) claimed that they have demonstrated the first silicon-based chip capable of operating at frequencies above 500 GHz by cryogenically "freezing" the circuit to minus 451 degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 Kelvins).
Is anyone in the scientific world still seriously using Fahrenheit? What happened to si. Ok, for old farts like me it's nice to have the weather in Fahrenheit because I know that 60 is a nice spring day, 70 is hot and 80, phew, what a scorcher, but if I'm doing science I would no more use Fahrenheit than I would measure distance in poles.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Maybe because heat dissipation in space is poor? I know you can do magic with water evaporation under such low pressure to dissipate heat, but how much water would you need to send up there to provide cooling for reasonable time?
Cheers
Raf
Radiation is a big issue for computers in space. Shielding equipment is heavy (=expensive to get up there), and the smaller (and faster) CPU's ICs become, the more susceptible to radiation they become.
There's a reason why NASA is trying their best to get their fingers on ancient CPUs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, incompetence is my guess here also. Most cell phones are running around a 500Mhz chip operating at a 2-2.4 Ghz transmit frequency.
Now saying that the chip is running 1000X faster than the chip in your cellphone would have been a good comparison, or some quote about the average PC chip being 2Ghz & this being 250X faster would have been good comparisons, but comparing the chip to the transmit frequency of the cell phone was stupid.
Obviously meant as a joke? It wasn't funny it was stupid. Being a dipshit is pretty poor comedy. It's not something that everyone can do well.
It seems for every jump in speed, Microsoft builds a more useless infinite loop...
I actually enjoy reading posts like his. I learn something that I wouldn't normally learn.
I initially thought that, but then realised that the article doesn't at any point describe what this chip actually does. So, I surmise that it isn't a general purpose processor (which would be a ridiculous leap forward: a processor that clocks in at around 200 times current-gen consumer systems?), but probably a digital signal processor of some kind. 500GHz might then be its sampling frequency, meaning that it could work with 250GHz signals. At this point, comparing its clock speed to the frequency of a radio signal is a useful, meaningful comparison.
500 Ghz (500 x 10^9) is a LONG WAY away from even the beginning of Infrared 3 TeraHz (3x10^12)
So a 6x factor is a LONG WAY?
The heating would be more even potentially, but shallow. The other (obvious) thing I didn't think of in my earlier post was that as you increased the frequency, the waves would penetrate less far into the food, meaning that you'd have cold spots in the center. Maybe this would be useful for something (something that you'd want to cook the outside of but not the inside .. liquid-center cakes maybe?), but in general I think it would just be annoying.
:)
There are probably other molecules that you could heat by using different frequencies: I think any atom which is an electrical dipole will be "microwavable" at some frequency; it might be that there are uses for magnetron-based heating systems at higher or lower frequencies in industry somewhere. (Is SiO2 a dipole?)
Or were you joking too and I'm going to get flames for responding to this?
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Yes, but one is feasible and the other isn't.
This 500GHz chip is massively smaller than a general purpose CPU. With CPUs the size of the modern A64 or P4 (or Core for that matter), 500 GHz would be physically impossible without using some alternative to electricity to propagate signals or at least run async. Electricity literally doesn't flow across the chip fast enough. Now a 2 square millimeter DSP doesn't have near those issues.