Big Blue demos 100GHz chip

oi

Further than that, they are talking about the switching speed for a single transistor, presumably driving no load (they don't say if this is nmos or pmos either). A very very heavily pipelined processor might have logic about 8 fanout of four inverters deep, plus pulse latched registers would bring you to about 10 gates deep, so if the 100 GHz was for the digital range of the transistor, the system clock would be maybe 10 GHz, probably less once the effect of load is included. I'm not good with the analog side of things, so I'll bow to joeuro above and conclude that should be cut in 10 again, so maybe 1GHz system clock with the current generation. This jibes with the statement that these are 4x as fast as a conventional transistors with a similar gate length (40nm refers to the gate length after some depletion, so this is about 5-6 times as big as the bleeding edge, and by rough calculation, about 1/2 the speed).

All that said, this seems like some very cool technology-- IBM's hardware is always very impressive. I hope they succeed in bringing it down in size.

Beers to joeuro for quick thinking, and beers to the brainy bofffins.

Actually....

Crysis' bottleneck is the GPU.

My 2.4GHz quad has no problem with PhysX assisted playing :D .

Re: still won't be fast enough...

to run Crysis? Erm, yes it will be - my pensionable 2.6GHz (single core!) Athlon64 manages to run it quite nicely when coupled to a (less elderly) 8800GTX gfx card. Now if your benchmark was CoD:WaW then that's a different story. <sigh>

Like most I'm wondering if a 10GHz processor will be fast enough to run the version of MS-Office that's out at the same time... (cheap shot I know, but it is a Monday morning).

Seriously though, IBM tech still manages to impress. Good on them.

And a similar GPU

To run Crysis 2...

No problems for encryption

You would need much more than an order of magnitude difference in computing power to change the feasability in brute forcing good encryption.

Discover some flaws in the protocols instead. Or get a quantum computer.

"Encryption? My arse "

No, they won't. You simply don't understand the issues and orders of magnitude involved here. Brute forcing, or even reduced key space brute forcing exploiting various loopholes would still require a geometric increase in throughput.

Obviously, with an NSA-sized budget, you could use an underground city-sized array, but all that money spent on researching how to bring some sort of reliability to the output of of multi-quibit quantum processors is the danger to crypto.

Encrypt your arse.

Increased CPU speed is only a linear improvement in breaking cyphers. So a 20x faster CPU will only take about 1/20th of the time as a current CPU. Since the better encryption technologies can resist a brute force attack for thousands of years, we're still talking decades or centuries

However, increased CPU speed can result in an exponential increase in cipher security, by allowing an increased key length. So assuming these CPUs aren't sold solely to hackers, encryption is hardly at risk.

If you want to break encryption, find the magic algorithm than can easily reverse what we believe to be one-way mathematical operations. Then don't patent it or share it with anyone.

That's simple...

... we just increase the key sizes. We will have a hell of a time, though, upgrading all the old stuff.

Sha65536. anybody? :D

and what about HDD/SSD...

CPUs that fast will definitely require a somewhat re-organized motherboard and disk IO

I agree that regardless of speeds programming needs to become a priority again.

Thumbs up as this is very interesting.

Re : Graphene...

Nothing wrong with pencils -just that we've not been clocking them fast enough!

Re : At last the solution to global warming

There's a joke alert for facetious comments!

RotaCyclic Nonsense

The abstract of the IBM paper (linked to in the article) clearly states that 100 GHz is a cutoff frequency. It isn't a switching rate, and you cannot compare it directly to a CPU clock.

um

is the answer cheese?

Rams?

Mutton?

not quite, but good thinking

First off, you're comparing individual transistor switch speed vs switching speed of a full pipe stage (probably 10-20 transistors deep, plus some pain from capacitive load and wire delay). The key bit is in the article where they say it is 250% the speed (2.5x) of a similarly sized silicon gate, so presumably the prototype is slower than a 40 or 32nm silicon gate. 100GHz number is attention grabbing, but not relevant to architectural speed.

Now, your idea about simpler architecture is not a bad one if the actual issue were a big fast gate vs a small slower gate, but there's two major problems. First, if you could make a significantly smaller core through the right choice of simplifying architectural decisions, with silicon gates, you could have more of those cores, or they could have wider execution paths (this was the driving principle behind the Cell's architecture). The other problem is that one of the major limitations on core speed is propagation delay along wires, particularly global interconnect. So, even if you have a very fast transistor, it still takes the same time for a signal to get from one side of the die to the other. This will be a killer if you can only fit a single core on your die. The more likely use case for big fast gates (assuming the processes were compatible) would be to mix them in sparingly along critical paths, and indeed the circuit guys already play all sorts of games with gate sizing (mainly for driving big capacitive loads quickly).