IBM's new 110 GHz chip
No joking!
Too bad this thing won't be in any Apple computer for less than $500 million!
Anyway, it's too bad IBM can't do this well on the desktop market...
<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020225/wr_nm/tech_ibm_dc_25" target="_blank">http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020225/wr_nm/tech_ibm_dc_25</a>
Too bad this thing won't be in any Apple computer for less than $500 million!
Anyway, it's too bad IBM can't do this well on the desktop market...
<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020225/wr_nm/tech_ibm_dc_25" target="_blank">http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020225/wr_nm/tech_ibm_dc_25</a>
Comments
This has absolutely on the PowerPC chip though therefor no baring on the mac community whatsoever.
But the downside to BJTs is two fold. One, the design of BJTs prevents dense packing of transistors meaning it takes considerably more silicon to put down the same amount of transistors. In the semiconductor industry silicon area IS money. Also their is no nice easy way to combine bipolars to form basic building blocks of logic (such as inverters) without considerable off state power drain. CMOS has a lot of headroom left in it before we have to consider alternatives like SiGe. But for communications devices this is certainly a great technology, only took them 20 years .
[ 02-25-2002: Message edited by: Eskimo ]</p>
~bauman
<strong>That's a SiGe HBT (Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor).</strong><hr></blockquote>
Dude, my mom had that same problem. <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />
:eek:
wow...
[ 02-27-2002: Message edited by: Crusader ]</p>
<strong>The thing this chip demonstrates is the process. Couldn't it be applied to other chips (i.e. PPC)?
~bauman</strong><hr></blockquote>
No, it demonstrates an advanced process for a bipolar transistor. Not a MOS transistor which all of today's microprocessors are made with. IBM has demonstrated advanced MOS transistors in the past, I believe at 30nm in size switching at 10-20GHz.
G-News
The world, and Exponential themselves weren't ready for the tech.
G-News
<strong>Exponential wanted to make a 604 variant made on a bipolar process running at 466-600MHz (back when a 250MHz 604 was the king). Must have been their old fabs but it was 600nm! At the time the regular 604e was being manufactured on 250nm... But there were samples running up to 500MHz I think. I wonder if a bipolar processor can be made now with advanced technology..</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes Exponential's chip was a BiCMOS device utilizing both bipolar and CMOS technology in the same device. Bipolar is very nice since it can operate at high frequencies at much larger features sizes. The problem as I stated earlier in this thread is that the power consumption and heat produced are enormous for the complexity required for a modern microprocessor. In order to make it use a reasonable amount of power they had to scale back on the number of transistors and thus as you stated were left with an underperforming part. To use that technology to compete with today's multi-issue, mult-execution superscalar processors would be futile.
Does anyone know the last time Macs had a MHz lead on x86? I'd say probably when the 350 MHz Mach Vs were out, or am I wrong?
Of course, the 604ev's needed lots of bandwidth to perform well, and they were hopelessly starved on the 50MHz busses Apple used.
Had Apple bumped up the bus/memory speed, those machines would have been much, much faster. Of course, they would also have been much, much more expensive...
Just kidding, but to your wize advice, will it be true in 20 years ?.
We will check this in time if AI will be still here. Em an will have 100 000 post at this time
"No, see, our new 1GHz Dual Processor can easily beat this 100GHz IBM crap. See it speed up the rendering of this Toy Story 3 poster! Wow, look at those lickable buttons!"
/steve jobs
<strong>If IBM can implement this technology into the PowerPC chip soon, the days of having higher MHz are going to be back....</strong><hr></blockquote>
Have fun waiting for that...