IBM and Georgia Tech have coaxed a chip to run at 500GHz, a record for a silicon-based device, by dropping the temperature to minus 451 degrees Fahrenheit.
The experiment is part of a project to explore the ultimate speed limits of silicon-germanium (SiGe) chips. SiGe chips are similar to standard silicon chips, but they also contain germanium for better performance and lower power consumption.
Adding germanium, however, increases the price of producing wafers and chips that come out of the wafers, so SiGe chips are typically only found in a few select markets. IBM has sold hundreds of millions of SiGe chips since it began selling them in 1998, but the cell phone industry gobbles up billions of plain silicon chips annually. (Germanium is sprinkled into standard silicon chips: Intel adds minute amounts of the element to create strained silicon in its processors).
At room temperature, the IBM-Georgia Tech chip operates at 350GHz, or 350 billion cycles per second. That's far faster than standard PC processors today, which range from 3.8GHz to 1.8GHz. But SiGe chips can gain additional performance in colder temperatures.
To that end, IBM and Georgia Tech scientists turned down the temperature and cryogenically froze the chip at minus 451 F. It's about as cold as things get. An extremely cold temperature like that is found naturally only in outer space, but can be artificially achieved on Earth using ultracold materials such as liquid helium. Absolute zero comes at minus 459 F.
SiGe chips, the scientists theorized, could eventually hit 1 terahertz, or 1 trillion cycles a second.
Ultimately, high-performance SiGe chips could be used in defense systems, space exploration vehicles and remote sensing. Conceivably, you could also build a computer for Ted Williams and other cryogenically frozen celebrities.
I can understand the boost from -451F Cooloing but these chips can turn in 350GHZ @ room temp???!!! NO Cooling device?!!! I'd like to see the cooling device for the room temp aplication at that kind of speeds!
That is amazing. 500ghz! Makes me want to cry. Does anyone else out there just hate to love and love to hate technology? I thought 4ghz was amazing when they overclocked a p4 on techtv (back when it was worth a crap) Anyways, i just have to say wow. Won't be long now until we're going "heh, you have a 500ghz processor, wow that is so 2010, step it up with the terahertz, here."
Do you seriously think that the CIA, NSA or other intelligence agencys will not have a vat of liquid helium in a basement running an encryption cracking farm of these CPUs in a few years? 128 bit wireless can be cracked now in a day or two with 2 laptops. How long would it take 10-20 dedicated parallel 500Ghz CPUs to crack 128/256/1024 bits?
what what what?? if they can make a 350 Ghz chip then why on earth can we only mass produce chips running around 4ghz tops?!?!? i'm sure there are some people out there who would pay 10 or 20K for a 100Ghz proc. Heck you could charge a pretty penny for a 10Ghz proc...
This is great for the Health industry as far as simulating the human brain or real life. I am surprised they missed that. Things like the Blue Brain project
The cooling, energy use, and hardware that hooks into something like that would cost ridiculous amounts money to keep it going and such. Not to mention that when they say "Room temperature" I believe they means running it cooled to room temperature (I could be wrong), which is still significantly cooler than the average processor runs at even with cooling. (Mine runs on average 32 degrees celsius, which is something like the 90's in farenheit, 42 (over 104 farneheit) under stress)
Are these full fledged processors? Chances are they aren't. These are more likely simple custom logic chips with a fraction of the number of transistors you would find on a CPU... just enough to perform a simple logic function to prove it can be done at that speed. The wavelength of the clock speed alone would play considerable havoc across the current footprint of a CPU. You'd wouldn't be able to keep the entire chip in phase with the clock.
Are these full fledged processors? Chances are they aren't. These are more likely simple custom logic chips with a fraction of the number of transistors you would find on a CPU... just enough to perform a simple logic function to prove it can be done at that speed. The wavelength of the clock speed alone would play considerable havoc across the current footprint of a CPU. You'd wouldn't be able to keep the entire chip in phase with the clock.
Ok, I did some research on Wikipedia. It seems that 500 GHz is at the upper end of the Far Infra Red spectrum. Microwaves go up to about 300 GHz. So instead of having a chip that microwaves your mind, you will be computing with an infrared lamp! Sounds like an interesting cooling problem.
Could be an interesting problem for fighter pilots; flying over an urban area with millions of infra red sources all over the city! Just hope they don't launch any heat-seeking missiles...
The speed record does not measure how fast we can make CMOS computer processors. The test measures the max frequency at which a single transistor can produce current gain. There was an article published in New Scientist in 2002 that was similar to this one: <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17323320.600.html" target="_newWindow">http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17323320.600.html</a>
Question: If IBM created a computer chip that ran at 110GHz in 2002, don't you think it would be on the market today?
that IBM was experimenting with the SiGe to see if it would acctuialy be feasible... and now they are trying to push the limits of the SiGe mixture to see how far it can go. This is far away from being retail just yet.
Chamtech's spray-on antenna uses a nano material to provide a low-power boost to antenna range. The wireless-in-a-can product may some day bring an end to unsightly cell towers.
Whether Apple will release a new iPad next month doesn't seem to be the question as much as what day it will happen. A new rumor has it down to the day.
Tommy Jordan, the man who shot his daughter's laptop for YouTube, gets a visit from police and child protection services. Oh, and Good Morning America.
Along with green-lighting Google's buy of Motorola, the Justice Department today OKs an Apple-Microsoft-RIM partnership deal to buy Nortel patents, and Apple's plan to acquire Novell patents.
EnerG2 opens a plant to make an engineered carbon that will improve performance of energy storage devices and make storage for start-stop hybrid cars less expensive.
There are a lot of things that AT&T's humongous Samsung Galaxy Note smartphone is, like a digital memo pad, a medium-size-reader, and a great photo companion.
As UC Berkeley students, the co-founders of "Back to the Roots" discovered they could grow mushrooms using recycled coffee grounds. Now their mushroom kit sells at grocery stores across the country.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/newsrelease/half-terahertz.htm" target="_newWindow">http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/newsrelease/half-terahertz.htm</a>
They also show some interesting photos of the new SiGe chips.
Another issue is heat dissipation. How much power is used to reach these high speeds? I would imagine quite alot.
It's one thing to achieve these results in a lab and quite another to create a viable product.
It does sound promising though...
Or could they make that taste like nacho cheese?
irrelevant.
No software maker on the planet is going to write software that
that chip cannot handle anytime soon,...
So what kind of radiation do these chips give off??
Could be an interesting problem for fighter pilots; flying over an urban area with millions of infra red sources all over the city! Just hope they don't launch any heat-seeking missiles...
Question: If IBM created a computer chip that ran at 110GHz in 2002, don't you think it would be on the market today?