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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."
Still hope for the G5 Powerbook then!
I think that speaks for itself.
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How long before I can get a kit like that for my P4?
and that is to IMAGINE A BEOWULF CLUSTER!
Oh, you thought I had something insightful to say? Nope ^_^
They do if they have a good run-up and are going downhill with a tailwind.
Suit has been filed against a well known business and a school for violations of Moore's law.
This space for rent.
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?
Is this enough for Vista?
TFA wasn't clear... I assume this wasn't running a larger fully synchronized CPU with memory and multi-level cache at 500GHz, but is instead running a smaller number of transistors at that speed?
Or have they just been fabricated to demonstrate that they can attain high GHz rates?
Everybody knows you can't trust ghz ratings. I mean, a 3.2 ghz athlon is clearly a bit faster than the 3.2 ghz pentium. Right? Oh, wait, you said .5 TERAHERTZ?!?! Oh, yeah, then I'll take one of those please. And that big ass freezer, thanks.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
That really is a great reference. With the ever increasing speed of processors these days, it would be useful to have a good reference unit, like horsepower. My desktop has 1 cellphonepower, but you can overclock an 805D to 2 cellphonepower!
AMD today announced the launch of the Athlon XP 500000+. The chip has a "stock speed of around 3.0 GHz, but is named for it's IBM equivalent".
Arggg read the article they said they wanted to test the theoretical limits of these chips. They know speed increases with temperature. They wanted to know how much.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
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Was it blazingly fast? Is this destined to be the new hot item this Christmas? Will IBM come under fire from companies like AMD and Intel?
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"
Do not place one of those "thin, mint wafers" on Mr. Creosote's tongue.
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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.
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Brings a whole new meaning to the engineers traditional sigh of relief
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Its all good......until you hit the bus.
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Since these temperatures only occurs naturally in space, why not build a super, big cluster of these things, hook them up to a satallite and launch it into orbit.
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.
i want a compile farm of these
The poor soul uses gentoo.
factor 966971: 966971
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.
"The achievement is a major step in the evolution of computer semiconductor technology that could eventually lead to faster networks and more powerful electronics at lower prices, said Bernard Meyerson, vice president and chief technologist in I.B.M.'s systems and technology group. He said developments like this one typically found their way into commercial products in 12 to 24 months."
I think I'll put off buying a new computer for a couple of years or so...
NEWS ITEM: Computer industry collapses due to consumers putting off purchases in anticipation of 500 GHz computers coming real soon now.
E Proelio Veritas.
That's a pretty odd microwave then, since most of them operate at 2.45 GHz, which is chosen because of the way it causes liquid water molecules to vibrate. See this article, particularly the graphs showing dielectric temperature as a function of frequency. It's pretty clear that a 10GHz microwave oven would be a lot less efficient at heating water than a conventional 2.45 GHz one, although I suppose you could choose a multiple of 2.45GHz and probably still have a functional product.
Overall, unless your goal was to build a miniature microwave (a 21st century E-Z Bake Oven?), I don't know why you'd want to use 10GHz instead of 2.4Ghz ones. The tolerances of parts in the magnetron and waveguide would have to be much tighter, I think, and this would almost certainly cause it to be more expensive.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
Didn't you ever think that if you had a digital signal entering your cell phone at 2.4 Ghz, you'd need a transistor in there that could switch at least that fast? You realize that there are other types of chips than microprocessors, right?
Nope. It's just slashdot posters taking the story out of context. Go actually read the article and notice that it doesn't say anything about PC chips or microprocessors.
Do you think that 2.4Ghz digital transmission is generated by magic?
The problem isn't that the writer is incompetent, it's that he assumed his readers weren't.
OMGFramerates!! FRAME RATES!!!!!11!1!12@3#
*ahem*
Sorry about that, Pavlovian reaction...
Wait a minute! These things can run at 350GHz (o_o) at ROOM TEMPERATURE! The fancy cooling is all nice and good, and 500GHz... well congratulations!
But heck, I'll take one even without the cooling.
Arggg read the article they said they wanted to test the theoretical limits of these chips. They know speed increases with temperature. They wanted to know how much.
The word "increases" does not mean what you think it does.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Because these dials go to 4.5 Kelvin.
The chip is codenamed Detritus, right?
First, mobile phones do have extremely high frequency chips in them. They have to in order to recieve and process the high frequency signals they deal with. Those high frequency chips are a fairly large part of their power draw, too - yet their draw is *tiny* compared to even the simplest CPU of that clock. Remember that clock speed means very little without a consideration of the number of transistors on the chip, energy leakage rates, and lots more I know nothing about.
/., this chip is a very fast very simple unit - not a large microprocessor. I'd guess they're looking into ultra-high-speed signal processing (hence the mobile phone analogy) rather than computer CPUs here.
You're making the erroneous equation that "chip" == CPU, which is far from the case. A phone's CPU may be clocked much lower. Even if it's integrated with the RF chip (I'm not sure this is ever done, is it?), the RF processing parts will be clock-multiplied or the CPU parts will be clock-divided to ensure sensible running frequencies.
I think you'll also find that, contrary to the assumptions made by most posters here on
No, what you need is a signal generator that produces a 2.401 GHz signal and a mixer to produce a beat frequency. Then, you process that much slower signal. You don't work with a 2.4 GHz signal.
And over there we have the labyrinth guards. One always lies, one always tells the truth, and one stabs people who ask t
How else would they be able to run java?
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And in other news, apples and oranges usually taste different.
The only question about computer speed that is important is, "Is it fast enough?" Of course, "fast enough" may change over time, and anytime you come up with a faster processor, some company like Microsoft will succeed in loading it down with bloatware. But I've got a customer who runs his company on software that I wrote for him 15 years ago, and the only reason he ever upgrades his hardware is because something breaks that is no longer available. Otherwise, the 8MHz 286 system would have been perfectly adequate.
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Simple calculation: speed of light is 3*10^8 m/s, frequency is 5*10^11, so in one clock you can travel 3/5 millimeter at the speed of light. But electrical signals in copper and semiconductors travel at approx. two third of the speed of light, so in one clock an electrical pulse can travel roughly 0.4 mm. Your processor has to be way smaller than this, because all routes signals can take from anywhere to anywhere must be shorter than this distance. And let's forget entirely about phase-problems, synchronization, ... These things are now already causing difficulties in chip-design, at current speeds where signals can travel several centimeters.
I honestly do not expect that processor speeds will increase very much anymore. The past however has time after time proven everybody wrong that made that statement.
int main(void) {while(1) fork(); return 0;}
Not really, because an EE would know that it's not just the RF output on a cellphone that works at 2.4 GHz, but also the signal processing unit. There is a digital system in the phone that natively controls the signal, rather than using older analog techniques. The general-purpose CPU for playing crappy java games and displaying inane text messages from your friends runs at something much lower than that, of course.
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The terahertz band is the holy grail of telecommunications because at such high frequencies, we can begin to test communications based on gravitational waves instead of electromagnetic waves. This represents significant progress toward that end. Gravitational waves potentially are not limited to the speed of light, which might pave the way to real-time satellite communications with no lag or communications with operations on other planets with significantly shorter wait times.
"a 500 GHz Silicon-germanium (SiGe) chip, operating at 4.5 Kelvins."
Imagine how fast it would run if they got it down to 0 Kelvins!
I just wanted to point that out, I think some posters are thinking about it incorrectly: "The 500 GHz mark was the goal when Feng and UI colleagues received a $2.1 million, five-year grant for the project from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in October. In contrast, the transistors inside the central chip of a powerful personal computer run at around 50 or 100 GHz, Feng said. The fastest that such a chip runs as a package is currently around 3 GHz." http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2003/01/24/ fastest_transistor_made_at_ui/
In addition, University of Illinois broke 600 Ghz last year.
http://www.physorg.com/news3662.html
"The speeds quoted in this article are maximum rated *switching* speeds of a single transistor. Synchronous logic designs of the type found in microprocessors involve synchronous cells (known as flip-flops) and asynchronous gates providing boolean functions on the signals passing between flip-flops. The maximum rated frequency of any design is limited by the slowest path between flip-flops and this is what the clock signal will be set at.
As the paths between the clocked flip-flops are typically anywhere between 2 and 10 logic cells deep and with each one comprising 10's of transistors (usually in complementary configuration to aid switching speed), the overall figure for an ASIC design such as a uProcessor would be at least 2-4 times slower than the maximum transistor switching speed (it's not quite cumulative, because as one transistor starts switching, the voltage at the at the `gate' of the next one has already started changing causing it to start conducting, and so on). I also have a suspicion that there would be other real-world constraints such as cross-talk (noise between transistors) and thermal problems. I'd hazard a guess that a production-quality chip would be somewhere in the region of a tenth the speeds quoted here!
However, these new materials and structures still make for an impressive speed gain over traditional Silicon CMOS designs." (The speeds quoted in this article are maximum rated *switching* speeds of a single transistor. Synchronous logic designs of the type found in microprocessors involve synchronous cells (known as flip-flops) and asynchronous gates providing boolean functions on the signals passing between flip-flops. The maximum rated frequency of any design is limited by the slowest path between flip-flops and this is what the clock signal will be set at.
As the paths between the clocked flip-flops are typically anywhere between 2 and 10 logic cells deep and with each one comprising 10's of transistors (usually in complementary configuration to aid switching speed), the overall figure for an ASIC design such as a uProcessor would be at least 2-4 times slower than the maximum transistor switching speed (it's not quite cumulative, because as one transistor starts switching, the voltage at the at the `gate' of the next one has already started changing causing it to start conducting, and so on). I also have a suspicion that there would be other real-world constraints such as cross-talk (noise between transistors) and thermal problems. I'd hazard a guess that a production-quality chip would be somewhere in the region of a tenth the speeds quoted here!
However, these new materials and structures still make for an impressive speed gain over traditional Silicon CMOS designs." (http://www.physorg.com/news3662.html)
This article has more of the details correct. http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn93 68
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Actually, an EE would know that the RF output on a cell phone is specifically NOT 2.4 GHz, but is actually 850/900/1300? MHz. See wikipedia for GSM and CDMA (fine, fine, and TDMA) frequencies.
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""a 500 GHz Silicon-germanium (SiGe) chip, operating at 4.5 Kelvins.""
"Imagine how fast it would run if they got it down to 0 Kelvins!"
Imagine how fast it would run if they got it down to -5 Kelvins!
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Does liquid helium really cost $24/gallon? If so, we might want to get ahead of the curve and see if we can run our cars on it.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Good article but nothing beats a picture from This article
what the aircraft's attitude is
Given that you're in combat, the attitude is likely to be hostile.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!