IBM Frozen Micro Chip Sets Speed Record

IBM along with Georgia Tech have created a silicon chip that can operated at 500Gig hz. That is a speed increased of about 250 fold. This was done by freezing the micro chip.



There has been talk of bring liquid cooled computer to the public market for a long time. I have not yet heard of one becoming popular with the public. I know 4.5 Kelvin is very cold, and it is very unlikely that the general public will ever see this available to them. But showing the speed that they have generated similar technology and greater speed may be brought to the home computer user.

Related News Links:
www.mybroadband.co.za
www.eetimes.com

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Get ready for your microchips you silly people!!!!

[edit on 22/6/2006 by Mirthful Me]

I dont know how interested every one hear is on this topic, but hear is another link about what is hapening in the Micro Chip Industry.

www.eetimes.com...;jsessionid=0YPGU1ANWEVZ4QSNDLSCKHA?articleID=189401280

I understand why they would use this technology in military, communication, and other "critical use" systems, but it seems like a waste to use it in things like cell phones that play video. IMO anyway.

I would love to see this applied to the home pc, but I won't be holding my breath. I imagine you will see these new chips being used in servers and such long before the home user will get to play with it. I think it would take a while for everything else in the computer to advance enough to make use of the speeds. I sure do want one though.


Pass

this make me wonder are commercial cpus limited in their speed

eg if one is rated at 1.3 ghz, is that the max? or the average operating speed?

if i just freeze it will it go up to 2 or 3 GHz?

Originally posted by tiddly54
this make me wonder are commercial cpus limited in their speed

eg if one is rated at 1.3 ghz, is that the max? or the average operating speed?

if i just freeze it will it go up to 2 or 3 GHz?

Tiddly
As I understand it, freezing the chip just makes it so it does not produce heat and thus damage its self. Also at temps that low it give you greater conductability.

I also think that if this should make it to the comershial market it will just be in the larger machines such as servers. It still is a pretty cool pice of technology though.

Originally posted by RedGolem
Tiddly
I also think that if this should make it to the comershial market it will just be in the larger machines such as servers. It still is a pretty cool pice of technology though.

Sure would be nice to think this technology would make its way down to business servers, but sadly most people would only install Microsoft Windows on it anyway. what a waste; probably crash even faster than it does now. LOL

Moley,
Yes they might just instally Windows on it, but why not? We are talking about just prosessing speed and no matter what ever you run the prosessing speed is good. I know you also need transefer speed, hard drive to memery ect. Red write speed, and other things, but you are still getting the prosessor speed. Which is good.

As Tim Talyor might say, "more power"

Originally posted by tiddly54
this make me wonder are commercial cpus limited in their speed

eg if one is rated at 1.3 ghz, is that the max? or the average operating speed?

if i just freeze it will it go up to 2 or 3 GHz?

Commercial CPU's speed is set at the factory after testing the CPU's speed at several voltages and speeds.

They look for the stable speed the CPU does at a certain voltage and that will be its rating.

If its rated 1.3 Ghz, you can usualy overclock it easily to 1.8Ghz.
If you use watercooling, peltiers, phase change cooling (-80°C to -110°C), or even more extreme types of cooling, you can usualy get double speed out of your CPU.


Now, to the article.
Cellphones don't operate at 2Ghz, the communications chips in them do and they are rediculously basic compared to a CPU.

CPU's in cellphones are somewhere around the speeds basic PDA's are, 200-300Mhz.

This 500Ghz chip is mostlikely another communications chip IBM developed for use in high speed data communications applications.

And to the author of the article, liquid cooling is pritty much common place these days. You can buy watercooling components and systems everywhere and they aren't that much more expensive then having to put 4 or 5 fans in your computer.

Phase Change cooling is becoming more commonplace too, but only with the overclocking enhausiasts.

Cryogenic cooling like you see in this article will never be used for home applications because its just plain useless. Its only usefull for high end specilized applications.

Great... 500ghz. Doom 3 will still lag and Windows will still be slow and unstable. If you release anything like this to the public Microsoft will just find another way to eat most all of it up with the operating system leaving you next to nothing for your application. Its sad when you have a 3.2ghz p4 with 2 gigs of ram and a very high end video card and stuff still has performance issues.

At least VISTA will be a step back in the right direction because they will get rid of that damn registry. Also interesting is the research being done to get rid of the wiring inside the chips. Supposedly getting them out would speed things up by somewhere between 250 & 500 times.

[edit on 24-6-2006 by Astronomer70]

Matrix, Astronmer,
Thanks both for your info.
It is good to know all you can know.

Originally posted by Astronomer70
At least VISTA will be a step back in the right direction...[edit on 24-6-2006 by Astronomer70]

I don't think requiring 128MB of video ram for the 'full experience' is a step in the 'right' direction. I think of XP as the recent equivalent of Windows Me and I can only speculate what sort of headaches I might encounter in the future working with Vista.

This workstation i'm on boots Win2k or Linux. W2K is IMO superior to any other Windows version and i've had many servers make it over 365 days without a reboot.

Which makes me think... M$ musta said "Oh crap... it's TOO stable!" and introduced XP with a host of integrated crap that's destined to cause problems. I'm a firm believer that the Windows OS contains timebombs to speed up the deterioration process.

M$ Windows absolutely sucks balls as an operating system from a geeky standpoint. Once we start seeing more *nix distros' that are packaged intuitively and deploy on an x86 box with the same simplicity and support as a Windows system, M$ is going to feel it.

(I thought it was kinda cheezy for them to freeze the processor and headline with those speeds. Even the Mhz whore Intel has never done that.)

[edit on 24-6-2006 by vinrock]

I personally run Linux half the time and XP Pro. the other, but I am forced to use XP in my work. I do Computer Forensics and that is an extremely CPU "heavy" application. I have yet to have any significant trouble with XP. My Forensics machine is running Pro, with service pack 2 and I have not had any problems yet, after doing approx. 100 hdd's on it.

I have been H2O cooling my machine for about a year now because I over clock and that is almost trouble free as well.

I think the new technology coming is fantastic.

I'm not sure how much power it would require to keep a chip like this at the desired temperature, but I imagine that that the supercomputers of today could eventually be greatly reduced in size and energy consumptions.

The other benefit to cold technology might be for use in deep space where these temperatures
could easily be maintained.

Kinda makes you wonder where IBM came up with this idea doesn't it.

Originally posted by FallenFromTheTree

I'm not sure how much power it would require to keep a chip like this at the desired temperature, but I imagine that that the supercomputers of today could eventually be greatly reduced in size and energy consumptions.

The other benefit to cold technology might be for use in deep space where these temperatures
could easily be maintained.

Kinda makes you wonder where IBM came up with this idea doesn't it.

Well, there are also thermal limits on the other side of the scale as well. More so having to do with construction materials; i.e., there was great care taken on the Mars rovers to ensure the electronics onboard could handle the extreme cold. You might be able to run a modern consumer processor with liquid nitrogen right on the core, but I wouldn't expect the rest of the system's circuitry to withstand that sort of cold.

I predict that optical processing and diamond-based semiconductor construction technology is going to really send us flying leaps and bounds. No thermal limitations with data moving at the speed of light.

[edit on 24-6-2006 by vinrock]

It seems that the rapid advancements in circuitry miniturization could soon solve the problems
of temperature extremes affecting primary controls.

How science with handle future mechanical requirements of deep space robotics
is beyond me.

Actualy, its the miniaturization thats causing the heat problems in consumer CPU's.

The smaller they go the hotter the cores get and the more power they consume.
This is mainly because the semiconductor materials they use are at the edge of their insulation capabilities and leak more and more power.

AMD, Intel and IBM are both working on entirely new methods of CPU building that should overcome these problems.

One of the reason they are moving to multicore CPU's so rapidly is because they know that without a solution to the leaking, poweruseage and heating problems, they will need to go bigger with bigger cores or more cores per CPU to keep performance going up.

Once technology like the TriGates is getting implemented (will take a while since the entire chip design has to be redone and recalculated to facilitate this new tech) power consumption will be cut in half and temperatures will be much better.

Thematrix,
Thanks for the info. I had to look up what TriGates are. I read an artical about them and it also talked about wet lithography. It the next few years the chips will be getting smaller and useing less power. It will be interesting to see how radical the changes will be to deal with all the poroblems. Hear are the articals though.

news.com.com...
news.com.com...

I have not hear anything about hollographic devices in quite a while. Woner what happened with that?