In the New York Times : Researchers Say New Chip Breaks Speed Record Before people go running screaming that IBM has a processor that operates at 350 GHz I read that article and it makes no mention of a processor. Someone I know sent me this pointing out the great technology advances that IBM is making with chip design and should Intel, AMD and Sun be scared?
Last time I checked the speed of light was still a constant at any temperature. Unless we get into mind bending quantum physics I think that at 350 GHz we can expect an electrical or electromagnetic signal to propagate the whopping distance of about 850 cm which is not a lot of silicon. The problems with the creation of a square wave with reasonable rise time are ghastly. That really shortens the distance a great deal. Perhaps super conductivity is at play here also. I am thinking that the nice folks at Georgia Institute of Technology have frozen a JK flip-flop to somewhere in the neighborhood of absolute zero but no where near Helium II temperatures. Fascinating to be sure and perhaps we will see 32 GHz microprocessors in the next decade. If so then I suspect that they will be very small work units with very small word sizes and instruction sets. Perhaps the overall execution speed would be around 10GHz or less. Regardless ... can we port OpenSolaris to it and will Microsoft Windows 2012 require at least 10GHz just to run notepad ? Dennis ------- Researchers at I.B.M. and the Georgia Institute of Technology are set to announce today that they have broken the speed record for silicon-based chips with a semiconductor that operates 250 times faster than chips commonly used today. 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. The researchers, using a cryogenic test station, achieved the speed milestone by "freezing" the chip to 451 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, using liquid helium. That temperature, normally found only in outer space, is just nine degrees above absolute zero, or the temperature at which all movement is thought to cease. At 500 gigahertz, the technology is 250 times faster than chips in today's cellphones, which operate at 2 gigahertz. At room temperature, the chips operate at 350 gigahertz, far faster than other chips in commercial use today. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
