zoom, Zoom, zoom – Speedier Chips
Posted By RichC on June 22, 2006
Imagine moving a full DVD movie through a network in 5 seconds … impossible? Yes for now, but the engineers and researchers over at IBM have build a transistor that runs faster than anything we currently have. Imagine the speeds that electronic devices could process data if they were zooming at speeds 250 times faster than cell phones? Imagine cooled chipsets in computers clocking up near 500 gigahertz … they would be “ultra-fast” says an article on msnbc/msn.
“What we’ve been doing in the last several years is pushing the absolute limits of silicon technology,” said Bernie Meyerson, head of semiconductor research for IBM. Researchers achieved speeds about 100 time faster than current chips in computers from transistors from silicon “laced” with the chemical element germanium. The test transistor achieved a speed of 500 gigahertz by a group from IBM working with the Georgia Institute of Technology, but only when they cooled it to absolute zero — yet the numbers were still impressive running it at room temperature: 300 gigahertz. (this humbles my notebook with an Intel Pentium M running at 1.7 gHz — room temperature.) According the the article, “Meyerson forecasts that the advances will show up in real products within a couple years.” I’m thinking maybe I should wait a little while to buy a new computers or upgrade my network components?
Comments