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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.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
How long before I can get a kit like that for my P4?
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.
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.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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.
You are welcome.
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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.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Brings a whole new meaning to the engineers traditional sigh of relief
**Life is too short to be serious**
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
"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.
I'm sure that is the author writing down to his audience. I would have thought the cellphone comparison made that clear.
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.
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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
If 80 degrees is a scorcher to you, then it sounds like Fahrenheit isn't the only obsolete unit in this post.
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.
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...
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?
How else would they be able to run java?
Badass Resumes
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.
-JesseNothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
"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)
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.
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
""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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