New Alternatives To Silicon May Increase Chip Speeds By Orders of Magnitude.

First time accepted submitter Consistent1 writes "A paywalled article in the "Nature Materials" journal describes the use of Magnetite to achieve ultra fast electronic switching, albeit, at the moment, only at extremely low temperatures. According to a story on Quartz, the team, led by Dr. Hermann Dürr from the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences hopes 'to continue the experiment with materials that can operate at room temperature. One possibility is vanadium dioxide.' Chips utilizing this technology may operate at clock cycles thousands of times faster than the silicon-based chips used today."

Comments

I thought latency was the main issue?

[Racemaniac]

I thought one of the main issues with increasing clockspeeds on processors besides heat is also the latency. at 3 Ghz a signal can only travel 10 cm anymore, and processors already have stages in their pipelines just to get the signals around. So going 1000 fasters would have to mean some major changes in how processors work i guess? since having your signal only travel 0.1 mm per clock pulse makes it rather hard to get the data around...