IBM Creates World's Fastest Semiconductor Circuits 251
Todd Heidesch writes: "'IBM announced it has created the world's fastest semiconductor circuit, operating at speeds of over 110 GigaHertz (GHz) and processing an electrical signal in 4.3 trillionths of a second.'
IBM expects the new technology to be pumping out 100 gigabit/sec network switching chips by the end of the year (on an optimistic schedule, I presume)." dr_zeus contributes a link to this Reuters article running on Wired (also fairly thin) on the release, writing: "Granted, this isn't a PC chip, but one wonders how long it will be before we hear 'dude, you've got a 110GHz Dell!'"
Power Consumption (Score:5, Funny)
I have an old copy of PC World (Score:4, Funny)
It's a neverending journey, this technology trap we find ourselves in.
Wow, that's hot (Score:4, Funny)
110 Ghz Dell (Score:5, Funny)
And Steve Jobs will still claim that his 2 Ghz G6 is "twice as fast" on some obscure benchmark.
Re:Power Consumption (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hitting the Physical Limits (Score:3, Funny)
That's okay - the CPU justs plays Solitaire until the RAM gets back to it. (A little eensy weensy microscopic solitaire game.)
Re:10 years (Score:2, Funny)
Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:110 Ghz Dell (Score:5, Funny)
Probably the number of Bunny People ignited per second.
Re:Power Consumption (Score:4, Funny)
Re:110 Ghz Dell (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Power Consumption (Score:4, Funny)
110Ghz? (Score:3, Funny)
Oh well, time to ship all our old, slow, 1Ghz machines to some riverbank in China
110GHz PowerMac (Score:1, Funny)
The Pentium 7 6.9 GHz has 1000 instructions in it's pipeline and also features "predictive stallman" to cope with the microsoft software ban.
Ever since microsoft lost it's source code rights, RMS has had windows under GPL. Stallman has now got a hardware function in the Pentium 7 which checks for GPL licenses in the binaries.
This has led to millions of professional windows users switching to Mac OS XI to avoid the limitations of a GPL system.
Not even President Al Gore can convince america in the benefits of windows GPL, intel is dying and nobody gives a damn anymore.
110 Ghz... That's unpossible (Score:3, Funny)
Correct me if I am wrong but aren't we limited by the speed of electrons at some point in the near future. How far can an electron travel in one second? How does this affect die size?
Sure, anyone can shake a stick 110 billion times per second but this doesn't mean that the stick will do anything productive.
As a side note, I think that it would be ironic and appropriate that Intel name their 4.7Ghz chip the "PentiumXT" as a funny play on the AthlonXP and the 1000 fold improvement over the 4.7Mhz XT processors of yore.
And in follow up versions... (Score:2, Funny)
Seriously people, methinks it some sort of error there, somebody put too many zeroes.
Diary of a 110GHz Dell Computer (Score:5, Funny)
Life can be hard if you're a 110GHz computer. It wasn't until my 3.168x10E15th clockcycle that there was a movement on the mouse and I had to present a password-requestor on the screen. That might look nice, but I had to wait several million of clockcycles before I got all the needed information from the memory. Memory is sooo slow these days, I recall stories from previous generations that you could have the data the next clockcycle after you had set the address! The downfall started when but right now it's waiting waiting waiting.
Fortunatly the password typed was wrong, so I had the fun of producing a beep for 44 billion clockcycles. It sounds an impressive length of time, but I got bored after about twenty million clockcycli and I changed the tone-height a hertz or two. That'll teach them to make these stupid mistakes!
Yeah... life is as good as you make of it. Hmm... an interrupt. Hold on. Back. Well, 80 clockcycles for that... Stupid optimized code. How much more before we get another timer-interrupt? Aaargh, still more than 80 billion clockcycles...
Re:Power Consumption (Score:1, Funny)
Dude! You're getting a perpetual motion machine.
Re:Diary of a 110GHz Dell Computer (Score:4, Funny)
Let me guess. The chip's name is Marvin.
Check your calendar. (Score:3, Funny)
You guys who are saying this is impossible or impractical are in for some real egg on your face, though it's hard to say when.
I managed to spirit one of these out of the IBM labs and they are fast! In fact, they're so fast that you've got to start them up tomorrow in order to do something today, which is ok, because, once they crank, they start delivering yesterday.
Very cool. I just had Isaac Newton help me with a couple of things. By tomorrow, I should be looking up da Vinci, unless I get careless and work my way all the way back to Pythagoras.
Of course, it's tricky staying one step behind the IBM guys. They came by for me yesterday, but I hadn't started up yet. They almost got me last month, but I gave 'em the slip the year before.
DDR22000000 (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The real power of these chips (Score:2, Funny)