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!'"
10 years (Score:2)
--Blair
Re:10 years (Score:1)
Re:10 years (Score:1)
"If anything can go wrong, it will"
I don't think it applies here.
(No, wait a sec, I think it does...)
Re:10 years (Score:2)
Re:10 years (Score:1)
=> x = log2(40)*1.5 = 7,98 years. pretty close.
Re:10 years (Score:2, Funny)
Re:10 years (Score:2)
Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:10 years (Score:1)
Re:10 years (Score:1)
we might bump into singularity before that time though.
loz
Re:10 years (Score:2)
'110 GHz Dell' (Score:1, Troll)
Re:'110 GHz Dell' (Score:2)
Re:'110 GHz Dell' (Score:2)
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of 110GHz IBM's all interconnected with some IBM 110GHz switches!!
Yikes.
I think I better upgrade my key length a bit or 1024.
That's incredible! (Score:2, Interesting)
My partner, Sean, worked at Cisco for a while, before the economic implosion, and heard some things about 100Gbit networking projects in the works. It'll be really sweet to see this hit the market in a couple of years.
Re:That's incredible! (Score:2)
Power Consumption (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Power Consumption (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Power Consumption (Score:1)
Lead all the heat it generates into a steam engine and it'll generate enough energy to power the whole comp.
You mean the whole house, right?. :-)
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise! [zappadoodle.com]
Re:Power Consumption (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Power Consumption (Score:2)
Re:Power Consumption (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Power Consumption (Score:2)
I have an old copy of PC World (Score:4, Funny)
It's a neverending journey, this technology trap we find ourselves in.
ARGGHHH!!! (Score:1)
As to the super-fast network speeds, that's great, but will it ever make TW's RR service quit letting rooted Win2crap boxes probe my ports 24/7?
110GHz Dell (Score:1)
dude, you've got a 110GHz Dell!
Sure, but what with Dell's "we'll only sell Intel chips" license agreements, it'll probably be running a Pentium 7 with a 1000-instruction pipeline and "predictive stalling," it'll cost $10,000 just for the processor, and it'll be slower than my Duron 750. :-)
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise! [zappadoodle.com]
Hitting the Physical Limits (Score:4, Informative)
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:Hitting the Physical Limits (Score:5, Informative)
Even at today's high-end speeds (2GHz) 100 cycles (50nS) is fast for dram access. This is why keeping fast chips stoked these days requires heavy caching (L1/2/even 3 on-chip is a must and heading for 50% plus of die area)
Re:Hitting the Physical Limits (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hitting the Physical Limits (Score:2)
Yeah, I've been wondering how long it'll take before increase in frequency becomes so difficult that people finally realise that fine grained parallelism is the only way to go. The vast majority of time consuming tasks could be made parallel. It's not as if parallel algorithms are a black art or anything - there's a lot of material on the subject available.
It's a shame dual processor systems cost so much more - otherwise people like me would grab one to try out ideas and write some parallel code. But because there's hardly any parallel code out there, nobody buys dual processor systems, and so no parallel code gets written :)
Maybe I'll save up some more...
Re:Hitting the Physical Limits (Score:2)
BTW, try programming a compiler that can take your code and make it run in parallel (procs/threads/whatever) it's really hard to do. All programs share data, the level of which determines their parallelness.
Try out the fourth engine that was mentioned awhile ago, it supposed to be blisteringly fast, but requires you to write a bunch of parallel programs for it to work.
Re:Hitting the Physical Limits (Score:2)
True. And very simple patterns like Worker Pool / Job patterns make it quite accessible. It's just an issue of exposure. As soon as on-die multiple cpu machines are mainstream, multithreaded programming soon follow.
C//
Processor fabrics (Score:3, Informative)
I'd still like to have even that modest potential, which would allow MAC (Multiply ACcumulate) operations at 10MSPS, for digital radio projects, etc. If you decided you need a different feature, just reprogram the fabric.
With today's technology, I don't see why you couldn't have a 4096x4096 grid with 4 way interconnects, running with at least a 1 GHz clock. This could do real time FFT, etc, straight from RF to anything. You could implement a crossbar switch in software for at least 32 streams (being conservative) at the clock rate, in software, with plenty of capacity to spare.
Processor fabric is a powerful concept, but Intel will never implement it, it's too much of a threat to them and their Von Neuman architecture. Someone else has to do it.
--Mike--
Re:Processor fabrics (Score:2)
That's what Thinking Machines did in the 1980s, roughly. They eventually moved away from bit-serial processors to more conventional bit-parallel processors.
The main reason why highly parallel machines have never gotten really popular is that, even aside from cost, they need special programming by humans. Parallel programming is a black art compared with serial programming. Compilers can't parallelize C worth a damn.
Re:Hitting the Physical Limits (Score:1)
Bad Physics... (Score:2)
-Adam
Re:Hitting the Physical Limits (Score:2)
It seems like you could put together a CPU with performance rivaling current high-end chips using a tiny fraction of today's transistor count if all data paths are only 1 bit wide. The die size could be miniscule.
The real power of these chips (Score:4, Informative)
At 110 ghz, a PHOTON only moves 2.7mm so figure that the actual signal propagation is like 2/3 the speed of that and you see that the signal can only travel 1.8mm in a clock. So, these chips are not going to be all that great for CPUs at 110 Ghz. Much better for signal processing likein routers or something.
Re:The real power of these chips (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The real power of these chips (Score:2, Funny)
Wow, that's hot (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wow, that's hot (Score:2)
4.3 x 10-12 sec (Score:4, Informative)
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:110 Ghz Dell (Score:1)
Steve Jobs will show off a 110GHz G6 and say that.
Re:110 Ghz Dell (Score:2)
Re:110 Ghz Dell (Score:1)
Re:110 Ghz Dell (Score:4, Funny)
Re:110 Ghz Dell (Score:5, Funny)
Probably the number of Bunny People ignited per second.
Re:110 Ghz Dell (Score:2)
With Jobs' 2GHz G6, Aqua in OS X can render the minimize/maximize window genie effect in
Fine print: Windows lacks the genie effect, proving the PPC's superiority over the Pentium.
power concerns (Score:1)
How Long to Market (Score:2, Insightful)
What's the standard IBM response? 10 years to market, IIRC. Taken the time to fully develop the technology to manufacture more than one transistor in a lab, and distribute it as part of a chip.
Stupid question (Score:1)
There are no stupid questions (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stupid question (Score:3, Informative)
First of all, the IBM transistors are not MOSFETs, the tiny switches used in CPU's and other logic-based circuitry. They are instead heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs). HBTs are lightning fast and can be used as low-noise amplifiers for high frequency signals, which makes them great for wireless and Gigabit optical communication applications, but they are relatively large compared to MOSFETs and so are not really suitable for making CPU's. (Notice that the IBM press release never mentions CPU applications, but instead focuses on 100 Gigabit optical communications networks).
Now, you may wonder why SiGe can't be used to make super-fast MOSFETs. The main problem is that MOSFETs require a dielectric, such as SiO2 to act as an insulating layer between the "gate" and the channel. However, attempting to grow a layer of SiO2 on SiGe results in separation of the Ge from the Si, ultimately causing device failure. Currently, people are trying to find ways to deposit new dielectrics with higher dielectric constants, such as ZrO2, to replace the SiO2. Once this is acheived it may be possible to put such a material onto SiGe to allow creation of a MOSFET using this technology. However, development of such high-k dielectric technology is probably 3-4 years away and adaptation of this to SiGe will be a few more years beyond that, so don't expect SiGe-based CPU's anytime soon.
One last thing. I don't understand why IBM gets all the press. Motorola announced 110 GHz HBTs [motorola.com] last October. IBM is really not as far ahead of the curve as they would like you to believe.
Re:Stupid question (Score:2)
AMD's Response (Score:1, Troll)
Look for AMD 110000+ XP Processors
What about the quantum barier? (Score:5, Interesting)
When in engineering school (a couple of years ago) my professor declared that we are moving towards the end of the speed and size improvements of microchips, because soon the assumptions aboout newtonian physics, on which circuit design is based on, will stop being reliable.
Usually you dont have to worry about quantumn effects (electrons tunneling and such things), because there are enough electrons to statisticaly average out the quantumn effects into the classical model.
But when you increase frequency you usually have to decrease the size of the components (so transistors switch faster). But if you decrease size too much you will not have enough electrons passing trough your circuit, to ensure the signal follows classical laws.
Well I guess the quantumn barrier was a lot further than i thought it was.
Or maybe IBM are not decreasing the size of their transistors but increasing voltages to make circuits switch faster.
Re:What about the quantum barier? (Score:3, Interesting)
And they've been saying that for over ten years.... and so far, it just hasn't happened.
>Well I guess the quantumn barrier was a lot further than i thought it was.
That's the problem with those pundits - when they make those statements, they assume that no more technological advancements will be found. And even if that were right, there's still a lot of the current CPU-manufacturing process that can be tweaked and milked.
Look at some of the recent technological findings - like copper interconnects and SOI. It took a couple of years before they even began to see introductory usage, and SOI is still far from being mainstream. And then again, a lot of chips are still being made on the 0.17 micron process. And to top it off, 0.10 and even 0.07-micron processes are in the works. Even without any new technological discoveries, the move to 0.07 micron SOI chips has the potential to last us through several more 18-month generations!
So what about other technologies? There's another manufacturing trick that's being refined right now that allows the crevisces between transisters to be made deeper than they are wide, which will allow us to pack even more transistors on a chip. And why stop with aluminum interconnects? Find a way to use silver. And there was a recent announcement about using stressed lattices to get even faster propagation. There are a lot of developments in the works. Yes, eventually we will hit a quantum limit - but I'm confident that it won't happen any time soon.
steve
Re:What about the quantum barier? (Score:2)
Your prof is in good company when attempting to forecast the future...Rutherford didn't think anything would ever come of atomic energy.
110 GHz Dell? (Score:1)
Judging from Moore's law... (Score:2, Interesting)
PowerPC 100 Ghz (Score:1)
SiGe-Bipolar-CML (Score:2, Informative)
Re:SiGe-Bipolar-CML (Score:2, Informative)
Wires (Score:5, Informative)
Did you know that P4 has a couple of pipeline stages that do nothing but propagate signal? (yes, they pipelined the wire ...)
The Raven
And the future gets worse .... (Score:3, Informative)
That's why copper wires were important - they reduced R. C on the other hand is a different matter - for years and years (untill about 3-4 years ago) no-one cared about the capacitance of wires - because they were usually small compared with the capacitance of gates and the ratios tended to scale down as device features scaled down - everything got faster together
To make matters worse many of our CAD tools have untill quite recently made statistical guesses about wire capacitance which worked OK during things like synthesis (compiling to gates) when the wire capacitance was a small part of the equation, now it does matter and means the the whole structure of synthesis tools will have to change to perform combined synthesis and layout operations in order to create optimal circuits
Moore's law? (Score:1)
I seriously doubt it! (Score:1)
More likely, you'll see it used in ansynchronous computing --and that will take some time.
110GHZ circuit != 110GHz chip (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:110GHZ circuit != 110GHz chip (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:110GHZ circuit != 110GHz chip (Score:2)
On the other hand, more complex circuits nearly always run significantly slower than ring counters. So if their ring counters are running at 110Ghz, then some simple communication circuit might run at 30Ghz. Depending on details.
Moral: as usual, never just blithely believe these press releases are implying what they seem to imply.
Dell ads (Score:2)
Maybe it's just the disgruntled ex-Dell employee in me . .
-Peter
Re:Dell ads (Score:2)
device speed != system clock rate (Score:4, Informative)
an inverter with a fanout of one. That's
what IBM was measuring.
In a general purpose system, the clock rate
is 15 to 20 times slower than that. This is
because each pipeline stage runs things through
several layers of devices, and the fanouts
(and fan-ins) are larger than one. That is,
each signal has to be sent to several places.
And that's ignoring signal propagation. We used
to ignore that, but recent designs don't. The
EV8 Alpha was going to have caches of its
registers. Yes, you read that right - each
execution unit was going to keep a small cache,
containing copies of stuff it had recently
sent to the registers.
So IBM's announcement doesn't imply 100 GHz
system clock rates. More like 6 or 7 GHz.
No more Dell dude! (Score:2)
I REALLY hope that that ad campaign will be long gone. Personally I'd just assume have 'Steve' die a slow horrible death when they release the 2.5ghz.. and he's burned alive by the heatsink on national TV...
But that's just me...
110Ghz? (Score:3, Funny)
Oh well, time to ship all our old, slow, 1Ghz machines to some riverbank in China
I dunno if anyone's thought about this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Meaning you may see this on a Mac first, rather than a Dell.
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.
Massively OT (Score:2)
Wow. I knew
Re:110 Ghz... That's unpossible (Score:3, Informative)
When you shove a few extra electrons in one end of a wire, the charge pushes a few electrons that were already IN the wire down a little. And they push some down a little, and they push some down a little. Just like standing in a tight line at the movies, and shoving the guy in front of you - it takes a little bit of time to propagate all the way down.
So the real question is "If I shove an electron in this end of the conductor, how long before I get one out the other end?" The two things that determine that are (1) the nature of the conductor, and (2) the length of the conductor. By keeping the amount of circuitry on the IC very, very small (which they assuredly did), the propagation time from one end to the other drops proportionately.
However, even beyond just making the die smaller, they are working on making materials propagate the electrical charge more quickly - recently, someone (probably IBM) showed that by using a stressed crystalline lattice, they could significantly decrease the amount of time it took to propagate from one end to the other.
steve
Real EEs please enlighten us (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real EEs please enlighten us (Score:4, Informative)
1) IBM did demonstrate a ring oscillator.
2) These are IBMs latest SiGe HBT transistors, targetted for the "8HP" process. At present, 5HP and 6HP are in production and producing ICs - a lot of GSM cell phones will have IBM silicon in them. 7HP is coming on line.
3) Yup - these process are not directly for PC processors. The processes are targetted at RF, electro-optical, high speed data etc. They have SiGe transistors and CMOS. The SiGe is typcially used as a front-end, e.g. 10gigabit mutliplexers and laser driver/demultiplexors and diode detectors for optical links and the CMOS does the back end processing - e.g. line equalization etc.
In addition, this is not the fastest semiconductor circuit. For many years people have been using semiconductors at tera-Hz for microwave stuff (granted maybe not ring oscillators but certainly parametric-active amplifiers). I worked on 94GHz radar systems over 10yrs ago that used active semiconductors (IMPATT and Gunn GaAs oscillators).
Re:Real EEs please enlighten us (Score:2)
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: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)
Not that far fetched (Score:2, Interesting)
When will all of this technology trickle down? (Score:2)
A more reasonable prediction... (Score:2)
steve
Marketing Hype!!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Not enough transistors for a CPU (Score:2)
Re:It wouldn't be in a Dell (Score:1)
Re:Booyah!!! (Score:1)
Re:Let's be realistic (Score:2)
Re:Let's be realistic (Score:2)
Re:Let's be realistic (Score:2)