500GHz Sub-Zero Processor

[Michael]

IBM and Georgia Tech have coaxed a chip to run at 500GHz, a record for a silicon-based device, by dropping the temperature to minus 451 degrees Fahrenheit.

http://news.com.com/Chip+breaks+speed+record+in+deep+freeze/2100-1006_3-6085568.html?tag=nefd.top

[RealNC]

6 years later and clock speeds have not changed at all. Was IBM doing actual research, or were the engineers just bored and started toying around.

[ChrisXY]

At room temperature, the IBM-Georgia Tech chip operates at 350GHz, or 350 billion cycles per second. That's far faster than standard PC processors today, which range from 3.8GHz to 1.8GHz.

That was quite a poor comparison since the article doesn't say anything about the "chip"'s capabilities. I somehow doubt it had everything a then modern CPU had but was more of a single-purpose chip.

Whole CPUs at this speed would also need to be very small since the speed of light is an upper bound of how short you can make a cycle in relation to the length of the leads in a cpu...

Press release from back then.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/19843.wss

[RealNC]

Whole CPUs at this speed would also need to be very small since the speed of light is an upper bound of how short you can make a cycle in relation to the length of the leads in a cpu

I suppose we need warp drive for CPUs :-P