Thank you, I did not notice your comment before posting the same link. I wonder how much better graphene will do at such frequencies and temperatures and how much of a breakthrough there is behind this summary blurb.

Answering my own question: nothing prevents silicon transistors from working over 400 GHz. IBM & GeorgiaTech have already done that.
http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/newsrelease/half-terahertz.htm
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/19843.wss
As it has been mentioned by user mc6809e in another comment, certain transistors have long since reached 1 THz, but I'm unqualified in the area and can't find the appropriate article or key words.

Keeping my excitement for some other occasion.

What formula? I asked for the estimation of the maximum frequency for a silicon-based transistor. A formula, along with the way it could be derived, would do. I looked for the word "frequency" in the article, yet I did not find anything directly describing said equation.

All right, you copied some numbers from the article. How are they related to the estimated maximum frequency of a transistor?

I asked if it was theoretically possible. The article implied it was not, and that was the reason for my question. As other people have already said, "the amount of power and heat" for Silicon can be negligible at 400GHz as well, so this is a very weak and unrelated argument.

And I'm tired of Internet dimwits that are unable to reason and who are ready to insult other people's brain capabilities any time they are unable to read and comprehend their posts.

Thank you for clearing this up. I've asked above why silicon (or silicon with some additions) cannot reach the theoretical threshold of 400 GHz the summary seems to make such a big deal of and didn't get a clear answer. Turns out it can and that theoretical frequency, as somehow expected, is not the limiting factor for modern processors.

The article you have linked to does not provide the definitive answer as to what the relation between the estimate in maximum frequency and electron mobility is. So it is not clear to me that silicon transistors cannot achieve 400 GHz. It is intuitive to conclude that the faster an electron can move through a material, the faster it can oscillate, and the higher you can crank up the frequency, so max estimation in frequency for Si is most likely lower than the one in graphene. But, again, I cannot find an estimation of max frequency for the silicon and, moreover, I expect it to be much higher than current processor frequencies, contrary to what the summary seems to imply.

And what prevents silicon transistors from operating at frequencies over 400 GHz in theory? I'd much very like to know the answer before gasping in excitement. Something is telling me this estmiation has very little to do with the current technological level we have now...

Great to see that you found the link I have already posted in an earlier reply! I didn't hold an

I just raised the point which I believe is important that the criminal's name he presented as a significant result is likely to be fictional. If you were a security researcher yourself and a criminal you traced would call himself Joe Bloggs, you would want to recheck your sources before presenting your discovery, would you?
There were lots of other questionable moments in his "research" related to Russian hackers, such as attributing all forum accounts having the same very common Russian username (which was a simple derivative of a word or a name, such as my username) to a single person who he coined as the culprit, without any additional justification that the accounts were actuall theirs.

It's not just Vasily Petrov. It's Vasily Ivanovich Petrov. Three very common placeholder names chained in a row. At least one person does have this name, but it seems very fishy to see a name like that in a hacker's credentials. I did not claim anything, all I did was make a valid observation that casted certain doubts on the results his work and he effectively muted me instead of giving his thoughts about this or just silently approving my comment.

First of all, I greatly doubt his article was read by millions. Second of all, how many readers spoke Russian to spot the questionable moment? Very few, I must imagine.

That is certainly a valid thought. However, a few comments praising his research got approved both before and after mine. In addition, he commented on some of them in person. This is leading me believe that he did read my comment, even though I will never be able to prove it (great way to deal with the critique, Krebs!).

He did not approve it, so it never became visible. A comment cannot be "deleted" it never gets "approved". How convenient.

He never approved my comment, so it never made it in the comment section. I didn't do anything significant, I just made a couple of observations that made his research look less exciting, the most significant find I already mentioned above. A good lesson for me to avoid dealing with blogs and bloggers that pre-moderate comments or at least preserve them locally.

I posted a comment on his blog a while ago where I questioned the validity of the results of his research that caught a lot of attention a while back. For example, one of his biggest finds was that that one of the scammer' name is Vasily Ivanovich Petrov, which is just a placeholder name just like Joe Public in Russian. He never approved my comment or provided any feedback. If he was an actual researcher, he wouldn't silence reasonable criticism towards him.

It's sad to see him get one meaningless article after another on Slashdot.

Nothing, apart from whimsical craving for tasty food. At least for the civilized countries where pretty much anyone has enough money and supplies to switch to a veg{an,etarian} diet.

For crying out loud, Google Trends compares search terms without any context. All the comparisons I've seen in this discussion make as much sense as mine. Time to write a new story about Gnome losing to goblins and dwarves?

(Disclamer: I'm no expert in routing algorithms or network problems in general)
Aside from both these problems having to do with finding a path on a graph, I see little similarity. In the TSP you need to find the shortest path to cover all nodes("cities") on a graph, while here you need to find a path between two nodes ("computers") which would both be fast and not cause traffic bottlenecks. I feel there may be many various metrics to define what an "optimal" path should be, each one better in one regard and worse in another (e.g. minimal/average ping, tendency to cause bottlenecks, average router load worldwide, percentage of traffic routed through the NSA headquarters and so on).