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."

Re:I RTFA..

[peragrin]

Several cell phones just run at real time. So they really do run at 2.4 ghz for the signal processor, while the system itself is on another chip at a different speed.

REmember even though it's running at 2.4 ghz it's extremely dedicated and doesn't produce a lot of heat.

Why?

[reset_button]

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?

Can these these chips do any calculations?

[the_humeister]

Or have they just been fabricated to demonstrate that they can attain high GHz rates?

Re:I RTFA..

[Tim C]

I think that's the point. Reading between the lines, this isn't about general-purpose CPU chips, this is about specialised signal processors. In other words, don't expect to be buying an Intel or AMD chip running at 30+GHz anytime soon.

Re:I RTFA..

[not already in use]

I didn't read the article, but people don't seem to be making a big deal out of the fact that they are comparing the frequency at which a cellphone transmits data to the clock speed of a processor.

Re:I RTFA..

[GundamFan]

Well it is all frequency of electomagnetic pulses... but you are right the comparison is mighty strange.

It seems the linked article was writen (badly) for a non technical audiance by a non technical author... So why write about super cold and super fast processors?

Re:THAT WASN'T THE POINT

[nonlnear]

Exactly.

By finding the last point on the temp/speed curve, they are able to much more accurately determine the entire curve. i.e. It's a lot easier to interpolate to more realistic cooling levels. And it makes for a cool headline too.

Uberistor?

[Lord of Hyphens]

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).

Re:Why?

[Vo0k]

He meant that 350GHZ in room temperature is by far more revolutionary than 500GHZ at 4K.

Re:i want

[Maelwryth]

Its all good......until you hit the bus.

Re:computers in space

[thiophene]

Because cold due to vacuum is different than cold due to liquid He.

Joke/Your Head

[DragonHawk]

You do know Moore's Law relates to the number of transistors on a chip, and doesn't have anything to do with clock speed, right?

You do know that jokes are meant to be funny, and don't have to be factually accurate, right?

Obsolete Units

[Silver Sloth]

From TFA - my emphasis

IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) and Georgia Tech (Atlanta) claimed that they have demonstrated the first silicon-based chip capable of operating at frequencies above 500 GHz by cryogenically "freezing" the circuit to minus 451 degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 Kelvins).

Is anyone in the scientific world still seriously using Fahrenheit? What happened to si. Ok, for old farts like me it's nice to have the weather in Fahrenheit because I know that 60 is a nice spring day, 70 is hot and 80, phew, what a scorcher, but if I'm doing science I would no more use Fahrenheit than I would measure distance in poles.

Re:Joke/Your Head

[xerxesdaphat]

Oh come on! I got the (slightly lame) joke, but I just get pissed off when people keep repeating this fallacy of Moore's Law being clockspeed. Sorry if that makes me a bit anal, and yes, I do always think the Nazis like I was in this case tend to look a bit stupid, but it's like `rediculous' and `MAC' and `legos'... sometimes you just get irritated heheh.

Re:Obsolete Units

[Dance_Dance_Karnov]

I'm sure that is the author writing down to his audience. I would have thought the cellphone comparison made that clear.

Re:computers in space

[Skinny Rav]

Since these temperatures only occurs naturally in space, why not build a super, big cluster of these things, hook them up to a satallite and launch it into orbit.

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

Radiation, most likely

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Obsolete Units

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm assuming that in the lab the scientists are NOT using fahrenheit to keep track of temperatures -- but they may when talking to the popular media or to their mothers. I happen to work with ultra-cold atoms, which are chilled to hundreds of nanokelvin. Kelvin is what we use in the lab, but if I'm talking to a lay audience, or my parents, I use Fahrenheit. These are really inconceivably cold temperatures no matter what way you state them, but I've found "a whole mess of degrees below zero" to be more meaningful to friends and family members than "a few hundred nano-whatsits."

Re:cell phones?

[tinkerghost]

Yeah, incompetence is my guess here also. Most cell phones are running around a 500Mhz chip operating at a 2-2.4 Ghz transmit frequency.
Now saying that the chip is running 1000X faster than the chip in your cellphone would have been a good comparison, or some quote about the average PC chip being 2Ghz & this being 250X faster would have been good comparisons, but comparing the chip to the transmit frequency of the cell phone was stupid.

Re:Obsolete Units

[moosesocks]

he gives the figure in kelvins, so I really don't see what all the fuss is about.

He's giving a figure that most americans will be able to at least somewhat relate to.

Re:10GHz Microwave?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously meant as a joke? It wasn't funny it was stupid. Being a dipshit is pretty poor comedy. It's not something that everyone can do well.

Re:Someone's gotta say it

[llvllatrix]

It seems for every jump in speed, Microsoft builds a more useless infinite loop...

Re:10GHz Microwave?

[j00r0m4nc3r]

I actually enjoy reading posts like his. I learn something that I wouldn't normally learn.

Re:I RTFA..

[julesh]

I initially thought that, but then realised that the article doesn't at any point describe what this chip actually does. So, I surmise that it isn't a general purpose processor (which would be a ridiculous leap forward: a processor that clocks in at around 200 times current-gen consumer systems?), but probably a digital signal processor of some kind. 500GHz might then be its sampling frequency, meaning that it could work with 250GHz signals. At this point, comparing its clock speed to the frequency of a radio signal is a useful, meaningful comparison.

Re:Can these these chips do any calculations?

[EvanED]

at light speed, an electron wouldn't have enough time to make it through the long circuit paths before the next clock cycle.

It doesn't need to go through the long circuit path...

In fact, signals haven't gone through a whole path since (at the latest!) the 286. The processing is already divided into stages, and it only passes through one stage in each clock cycle. (Look up pipelining.)

It would be theoretically possible to design a chip that operated at a lot higher clock speed just by making the stages shorter.

Think of an old fire fighting bucket brigade. If you have one person carry the bucket from the source to the fire, you're gonna have a hard time getting control. If you add people, at some point you can add people until everyone just passes the buckets down the line without moving. If you continue to add people, the buckets will probably not move a lot faster, but you'll have more buckets "in flight" at any given time. Note that the time it takes any given bucket to get to the fire has actually INCREASED because there's overhead in the handoffs and everyone isn't synchronized, but you're gonna get a lot more water on the fire than if you just had one person. You'll also see a bucket being thrown onto the fire much more frequently.

In some sense, the buckets are like instructions, the firefighters are like pipeline stages, and the frequency with which any given person changes buckets is like the clock speed. In a processor, you can add more stages to your pipeline and make it so that each stage has each instruction for less time. There is a limit to the minimum time, just as there is for the firemen (you at least have to grab the bucket from the person before you and let go when the person in front has it, and adding more people to the line won't help at all with that overhead), but the limit isn't the time from fire hydrant to fire.

Re:Ah!

[chgros]

500 Ghz (500 x 10^9) is a LONG WAY away from even the beginning of Infrared 3 TeraHz (3x10^12)
So a 6x factor is a LONG WAY?

Re:10GHz Microwave?

[Kadin2048]

The heating would be more even potentially, but shallow. The other (obvious) thing I didn't think of in my earlier post was that as you increased the frequency, the waves would penetrate less far into the food, meaning that you'd have cold spots in the center. Maybe this would be useful for something (something that you'd want to cook the outside of but not the inside .. liquid-center cakes maybe?), but in general I think it would just be annoying.

There are probably other molecules that you could heat by using different frequencies: I think any atom which is an electrical dipole will be "microwavable" at some frequency; it might be that there are uses for magnetron-based heating systems at higher or lower frequencies in industry somewhere. (Is SiO2 a dipole?)

Or were you joking too and I'm going to get flames for responding to this? :)

Re:I RTFA..

[JDevers]

Yes, but one is feasible and the other isn't.

This 500GHz chip is massively smaller than a general purpose CPU. With CPUs the size of the modern A64 or P4 (or Core for that matter), 500 GHz would be physically impossible without using some alternative to electricity to propagate signals or at least run async. Electricity literally doesn't flow across the chip fast enough. Now a 2 square millimeter DSP doesn't have near those issues.

Re:computers in space

[dbIII]

A superconducting CPU wouldn't produce any heat.

However by not being a semiconductor it will not be a CPU.