FAST! IBM Develops 100GHz Transistor Device

[rambo117]

Overclocking anyone? 😛

 

[dman3k]

intel craps its pants... and will offer ridiculous bundle pricing that will force manufactures to stay intel only

 

[JonathanDeane]

[citation][nom]cheepstuff[/nom]this is not the case, graphite and graphene are NOT the same price. graphite is a naturally occuring compound composed if sheets of graphene bonded together. graphene is hard to extract and there is no current industrial process that can mass produce this substance efficiently. it is currently surpasses gold as one of the most expensive materials known. making a main stream chip with this is years away and it will only happen when the price comes down.[/citation]

Well sand is silicon the same thing they make chips out of.... The price difference is of course huge. I doubt that after they start making an honest stab at making the stuff the price will be very much different. Sure right now its expensive as hell as was the first batches of doped silicon. When talking about new things the price is always absurdly high.

The point is when your buying computer chips the raw material is hardly something to be worried about (your buying a very small item to begin with so no matter how the material costs its still going to be a small percentage of what your paying for)

 

[icedeocampo]

"Want to encode the extended edition of Return Of The King in 4 seconds?
No problem."

"Want to open 1000 photo's from a 20MP camera in CS3?
No problem."

"Want to run 10 separate instances of Crysis at 2560 x 1600?
No problem."

I think to be able to do the things above, we need to have faster storage options... we need faster hard drives.

 

[masterjaw]

Hopefully, this new one would produce something way better than the current existing solutions.

 

[nottheking]

[citation][nom]cheepstuff[/nom]it is currently surpasses gold as one of the most expensive materials known.[/citation]
Actually, gold never was the most expensive material by a long shot. while it made big news after passing $1,000US an ounce a bit back, Platinum has well passed $1,500US... And it's ALSO used in computer production as well, as it's one of the three main metals used for the magnetic coating in hard disks, along with Palladium, (which currently runs $400US/oz or so) and Cobalt. (which isn't that expensive) And to say nothing of the price of other, more-restricted materials, like plutonium-238, (the material for "atomic batteries") where the price of a single GRAM can run well over $4,000US, making it over 100 times as valuable as gold. Many radioactive isotopes run higher, like Californium-249, which can be well over $100,000,000US per gram.

But at any rate, the good news is that exfoliated, pure graphene may run at about $28-44US million per gram, these chips are not using pure stuff, but just graphene bonded to silicon carbide, which is a millionth the price. (i.e, $28-44US a gram) Further, since the cost of the materials is almost zero by comparison, refinement in production techniques can bring this down further, making it as cheap as traditional silicon fabrication.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

This starting to to sound like really big bucks are at stake.

 

[Guest]

Now my endless loop will run in under 2 hours.

 

[rambo117]

[citation][nom]icedeocampo[/nom]"Want to encode the extended edition of Return Of The King in 4 seconds?No problem.""Want to open 1000 photo's from a 20MP camera in CS3?No problem.""Want to run 10 separate instances of Crysis at 2560 x 1600?No problem."I think to be able to do the things above, we need to have faster storage options... we need faster hard drives.[/citation]
intelligent comment fail

 

[back_by_demand]

[citation][nom]Shadow703793[/nom]One problem: Crysis is for Windows only and the CPU is most likely to be PPC.[/citation]
Hence the further quote
[citation][nom]back_by_demand[/nom]OK, we aren't there yet, but the future is looking very bright.[/citation]
We're not, but it is.

 

[enyceckk101]

Will it bottleneck with the video card?

 

[jonnyzat]

i understand

 

[jonnyzat]

i understand that the benchmark of 100GHz is eye catching but is this really news? carbon is the best and most versatile element in existence. it can do almost frigging anything. graphene is old news and it is strange that many companies have not been pouring millions into R&D. wanna make some for cheap? take a #1 pencil and draw on something or shade a large area. instant(poor quality) graphene! im sure some of you must remember manually increasing(or attempting to) your nVidia GPU V-core voltage buy meticulously shading resistors directly on the card or oc'ing old school athlons or durons in a similar way...

 

[jonnyzat]

[citation][nom]jonnyzat[/nom]i understand[/citation]
Tom's Hardware software fail

 

[anamaniac]

This has me excited. =D

 

[anamaniac]

[citation][nom]nottheking[/nom]Actually, gold never was the most expensive material by a long shot. while it made big news after passing $1,000US an ounce a bit back, Platinum has well passed $1,500US... And it's ALSO used in computer production as well, as it's one of the three main metals used for the magnetic coating in hard disks, along with Palladium, (which currently runs $400US/oz or so) and Cobalt. (which isn't that expensive) And to say nothing of the price of other, more-restricted materials, like plutonium-238, (the material for "atomic batteries") where the price of a single GRAM can run well over $4,000US, making it over 100 times as valuable as gold. Many radioactive isotopes run higher, like Californium-249, which can be well over $100,000,000US per gram.But at any rate, the good news is that exfoliated, pure graphene may run at about $28-44US million per gram, these chips are not using pure stuff, but just graphene bonded to silicon carbide, which is a millionth the price. (i.e, $28-44US a gram) Further, since the cost of the materials is almost zero by comparison, refinement in production techniques can bring this down further, making it as cheap as traditional silicon fabrication.[/citation]
Well, now my question is, what could they do using pure graphene?
$100,000,000 CPU anyone?
Also, interesting to know just how valuable a little Californium-249 is.

 

[MrMaestro]

That something can cycle 100 million times in one second boggles the mind...

 

[MrMaestro]

Whoops, I meant billion. 100MHz is still amazing when you think about it though.

Ahh... there's really no way I can get out of looking like a moron just now is there.

 

[anamaniac]

[citation][nom]MrMaestro[/nom]That something can cycle 100 million times in one second boggles the mind...[/citation]
Kilo = 1,000
Mega = 1,000,000
Giga = 1,000,000,000
100GHz = 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) cycles per second.
It's a big difference. =D

 

[r0x0r]

"Hey Vegeta, what does the software say about the gigahertz level?

"IT'S OVER NINE...TY!!!"

 

[netbookuser]

Two comments...

#1 - just because IBM got a chip up to 500GHz does not diminish this article in the slightest. They had to use an exotic solution to get to 500GHz. This 100GHz transistor is probably at or near room temperature. If you used this 100GHz transistor to make a chip and then put it in the same freezing solution, that 500GHz barrier would probably look like nothing.

#2 - Yes, that current transistor would only make a chip in the 8+ GHz range for now. But remember that it says a gate length of 240nm. Imagine what it could do at say 32nm or even smaller. That won't be immediate, but long-term it very well could be.

Truly a good find by IBM!

 

[830hobbes]

[citation][nom]amabhy[/nom]AND YES OF COURSE THIS WILL RUN CRYSIS[/citation]
I think cutting people off before they even say this should count as just as bad as saying it. How different is it to ask whether it'll play crysis vs. just saying that it will? Useless and annoying either way.

 

[830hobbes]

Also, one extremely important thing they failed to mention in this article:

Lin cautioned against thinking of graphene as a substitute for the silicon-based microprocessors used in today's computers, at least at anytime in the near future. One major roadblock is that graphene does not work easily with discrete electronic signals, he explained. Because graphene is a zero bandgap semiconductor, meaning there is no energy difference between its conductive and nonconductive states, transistors made of the semiconductor cannot be turned on and off. In contrast, silicon has a bandgap of one electron volt, making it good for processing discrete digital signals, Lin said.

Instead, graphene is better suited for making analog transistors, such as signal processors and amplifiers. Today, such circuitry is largely made from GaAs (gallium arsenide), though GaAs offers nowhere near the same electron mobility, Lin said.

 

[kalogagatya]

hmm maybe phase changing cooling will be the standard for this kind of speeds

 

[eyemaster]

I thought the transistor gates in a CPU opened at 1 per hertz, so a 4GHz would open gates at 4GHz, not multiple times per GHz. The frequency is what causes the gates to open, no?

Yes, it takes more than one cycle per instructions, say 22 steps in the cpu core for what ever type of chips, but that means 22 frequency cycles, not 22 times in 1 hertz.