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Frozen Chip from IBM hits 500 GHz

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the there's-a-catch-,,, dept.

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."

3 of 417 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I RTFA.. by ignipotentis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can understand your concern. However, after IBM backs this up, it forces me to do more research (which, I haven't finsihed yet obviously).

    --
    Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
  2. 1.2mm per cycle by bytesex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    350 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 (375 809 638 400) cycles per second divided by the distance light travels in a second (299 792 458 000 mm / s) is 1.2 mm. Just thought I'd throw that in.

    --
    Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
  3. Re:Can these these chips do any calculations? by daBass · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You are right, sort of. This could be useful for some very specialized processors that are very simple but need to do these simple operations very fast.

    A CPU like the one we use now in PCs can't go much higher than 10GHz simply because, at light speed, an electron wouldn't have enough time to make it through the long circuit paths before the next clock cycle.