IBM planning 210GHZ (not a typo) chips within 2 years

[MadMatt]

This came out yesterday, but I haven't seen anyone else post on it...
http://www.ibm.com/news/2001/06/25.phtml http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-6355782.html

IBM's silicon germanium (SiGe) technology to reach speeds of 210 GHz while drawing just a milliamp of electrical current.

These chips are destined for High Speed (duh!) optical switches. The high end chips in that market already run at 40GHZ (who knew!). Still, this means that the limits of silicon are a lot further out than people thought...

[MadMatt]

Nevermind. Scott had it on the news page hours before my post.
http://sysopt.earthweb.com/news/gws/cdata/Forum1/HTML/000107.html

[club_med]

This is too cool, i wonder what the price tag will be when these babies are out ?.
cm.

[araaraara]

So that means I'll be stuck with a 100ghz chip in a few years, for a decade? Too bad.

What kind of software would need that kind of power? Quake 3000th edition @ 100 000 fps?

Maybe they'll the cheap way of multiple clients sharing the cpu or two in a server. That's 1ghz for 210 people!

I bet a couple of those chips could crack RC5-64 in a few days! At what, 500 bkeys/sec?

[This message has been edited by araaraara (edited 06-28-2001).]

[Sweeper]

Guess I will be looking for my new Heatsink/fan.... Maybe a nice 700,000 RPM fan will do. Good upgrade from my 7,000 RPM I have now. Wonder if it will blow my case over? http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif

[MadMatt]

According to IBM, a single circuit (which these chips will have tens or even hundreds of millions of) will be so fast that every person on earth flipping a light switch 40 times per second would not equal it...

[Hellmund]

Will this have any impact on CPU's or is it solely for high speed optical switches?

[daverme]

Read it again, fellas (& gals) !!! They are talking about a 210 GHz TRANSISTER. I dunno how that translates to CPU speeds.