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Boffins from IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) have produced what they claim is the world's fastest silicon chip thanks to what must be the acme of overclocking. The researchers reached a clock speed of 500GHz by reducing its temperature to just 4.5° above absolute zero.

The feat was part of the team's exploration of fourth-generation Silicon-Germanium (SiGe) devices, which IBM and GIT are investigation for future comms chip applications. The scientists wanted to see just how fast such a chip could be persuaded to run without malfunctioning or, in extreme cases, melting.

If cooling a machine down to -268.5°C seems a trifle impractical, take heart from the boffins' other efforts, which saw the chip running at 350GHz at room temperature - rather better than the 2GHz commercial products for communications applications typically run at today. ®

Saw this on slashdot tuesday, I still don't quite understand this statement...

Article Writer wrote:By comparison, 500 GHz is more than 250 times faster than today's cell phones, which typically operate at approximately 2 GHz, according to the organizations.

It was a communications chip. (i.e., it goes in cell phones.)

Utterly useless as an overclock, givin that it's not exactly a general computing chip.

Now 5GHZ conroes...

InnocentBystander wrote:Saw this on slashdot tuesday, I still don't quite understand this statement...

Article Writer wrote:By comparison, 500 GHz is more than 250 times faster than today's cell phones, which typically operate at approximately 2 GHz, according to the organizations.

I always get a laugh at ignorant writers who don't know what a gigahertz is.

On G4 the other day they said it ran 250 times faster than most computers, at "500 gigahertz per second".

That's as bad as the CNN "18 times faster than the speed of light" or BBC News "30 billion will watch the World Cup" comments.

Yeah, I hit the rewind button and watched it again just to see if I had heard it right

That's as bad as the CNN "18 times faster than the speed of light"

Nah, that particular comment is in a whole other league. GHz/sec is just a redundant term, and '30 Billion' is at least possible... what exactly was this in reference too?

Admiral Valdemar wrote:That's as bad as the CNN "18 times faster than the speed of light" or BBC News "30 billion will watch the World Cup" comments.

The BBC comment is weird, but I've always just assumed it means 30 billion man-game-views will occur; ie on average everyone on the planet will watch 5 games.

I thought diamond chips were going to replace silicon chips...