So the measurement goes as follows MHz, GHz, and then next what??

[david opheim]

The units of measurements goes as follows -- MHz then, GHz, and then what follows this ? Does anybody know?

 

[nekulturny]

Terahertz.

 

[Pinhedd]

They follow the standard SI prefix

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

Next would be Terahertz, followed by Petahertz, Exahertz, etc...

These frequencies are physically impossible to reach for complex integrated circuits

 

[nekulturny]

These frequencies are physically impossible to reach for complex integrated circuits

Duh, I know you woudln't be a card carrying member of the IEEE if you hadn't watched Star Trek. Of course it is! Just wait til we discover anti-matter and warp technology. :lol:

 

[Pinhedd]

These frequencies are physically impossible to reach for complex integrated circuits

Duh, I know you woudln't be a card carrying member of the IEEE if you hadn't watched Star Trek. Of course it is! Just wait til we discover anti-matter and warp technology. :lol:

Discover antimatter? We've been producing antimatter since at least the 1950s but the quantities are so small so as to not be useful at all yet. In another 20-30 years we should be producing enough antimatter to start looking at practical applications

 

[nekulturny]

I don't even know what anti-matter is. lol. But what about warp technology? Anti-matter sounds big, sort of like having 20,000 gigaquads of information added to your database.

 

[jaguarskx]

Were are so far away from TeraHertz that it is not even funny.

 

[jaguarskx]

Discover antimatter? We've been producing antimatter since at least the 1950s but the quantities are so small so as to not be useful at all yet. In another 20-30 years we should be producing enough antimatter to start looking at practical applications

I would say much more than 30 years since thus far only a few milligrams of antimatter (positrons, antiprotons and anitneutrons ) have been man made. Antimatter is naturally created by radioactive decay but they only occur in very, very, very minute quantities.

Believe it or not, even a simple banana produces antimatter (positrons). This is due to the natural decay of Potassium 40 isotopes and it is estimated that a single banana produces one positron atom every 75 minutes.

 

[nekulturny]

I was making a joke, I didn't expect such a serious response from Pinhead. Oh well, how very Vulcan of him! :lol:

 

[Pinhedd]

I would say much more than 30 years since thus far only a few milligrams of antimatter (positrons, antiprotons and anitneutrons ) have been man made. Antimatter is naturally created by radioactive decay but they only occur in very, very, very minute quantities.

Believe it or not, even a simple banana produces antimatter (positrons). This is due to the natural decay of Potassium 40 isotopes and it is estimated that a single banana produces one positron atom every 75 minutes.

The rate of production has been growing somewhat exponentially. Actual commercialization would be farther than that though

 

[palladin9479]

The rate of production has been growing somewhat exponentially. Actual commercialization would be farther than that though

The bigger issue is containing it. There is no practical method of holding onto it for more then mere fractions of a second. The moment anti-mater gets anywhere near normal mater it reacts and annihilates it. Producing it seems easy in comparison to controlling it.

Anyhow about "clock frequencies" and such. You run into a very real physics problem as you go up. The upper limit is the speed of a free electron in whatever material your using. The more electrons you push into a thin path the more QM comes into play and weird things start to happen. 50Ghz+ CPU's would require a superconductor to work. So either you run your computer at -270C / -450F or discover a room temperature superconductor.

How's that for "extreme overclocking".

 

[Pinhedd]

The bigger issue is containing it. There is no practical method of holding onto it for more then mere fractions of a second. The moment anti-mater gets anywhere near normal mater it reacts and annihilates it. Producing it seems easy in comparison to controlling it.

Anyhow about "clock frequencies" and such. You run into a very real physics problem as you go up. The upper limit is the speed of a free electron in whatever material your using. The more electrons you push into a thin path the more QM comes into play and weird things start to happen. 50Ghz+ CPU's would require a superconductor to work. So either you run your computer at -270C / -450F or discover a room temperature superconductor.

How's that for "extreme overclocking".

Electrons actually move very slowly because they bounce around a lot. What's important isn't the electrons themselves but the electric field. A single electron does not have to move from A to B, all that matters is that an electron leaves A and an electron enters B, like an expressway they can be different electrons

 

[mactronix]

It dosent really matter (no pun intended) you need way way more antimatter than has ever been created artificially to actually do anything, that looking inside of a couple of generations may well be unrealistic, as far as actually using it for any applications on a larger than particle scale. Even then it takes one heck of a lot of times more power to actually create a particle of antimatter than it can ever return.

@ david opheim,

Look what you started :lol:

 

[Pinhedd]

It dosent really matter (no pun intended) you need way way more antimatter than has ever been created artificially to actually do anything, that looking inside of a couple of generations may well be unrealistic, as far as actually using it for any applications on a larger than particle scale. Even then it takes one heck of a lot of times more power to actually create a particle of antimatter than it can ever return.

@ david opheim,

Look what you started :lol:

would you rather have another Turbo C thread?

 

[mactronix]

Hell NO

Mactronix

 

[Pinhedd]

Hell NO

Mactronix

Glad we're in agreement then

 

[Thomas_89]

I think new architectures will bring us more performance increase than any under somewhat practical circumstances feasible upper limit in frequency. Imagine a Intel 80386 @ 50 GHz competing against an Core i7 3930K @ say, 4.0 GHz Not to mention we need a benchmark both can actually run

 

[themegadinesen]

Terahertz is a long long long long way to go

 

[Pinhedd]

Terahertz is a long long long long way to go

It's not that it's a long long way to go, it's not even possible. The fastest silicon based switching transistor ever created operates at a little over 600Ghz and even being optimistic the practical limit is probably twice that. So even with a 1.2-1.5 Thz switching transistor we'd still need to put dozens if not hundreds of them into a single CMOS logic network and even then we've only created one single function, hardly an ASIC.

 

[themegadinesen]

It's not that it's a long long way to go, it's not even possible. The fastest silicon based switching transistor ever created operates at a little over 600Ghz and even being optimistic the practical limit is probably twice that. So even with a 1.2-1.5 Thz switching transistor we'd still need to put dozens if not hundreds of them into a single CMOS logic network and even then we've only created one single function, hardly an ASIC.

I wasn't thinking about silicon . Diamond and graphite is the way to go

 

[jaguarskx]

The rate of production has been growing somewhat exponentially. Actual commercialization would be farther than that though

Fusion power is still a long way out from being commercially viable and it is much a "easier" technology to work with compared antimatter. The commercialization of antimatter is much further away in the future for anything other than research.

 

[palladin9479]

I wasn't thinking about silicon . Diamond and graphite is the way to go

Yep, like all things Silicon has a finite limit. It's as I said, the absolute speed limit for a given material is based on how fast an electron can move through it. Faster your electrons move the shorter the time between signal generation and signal reception, aka signal propagation. The shorter that time the more signals can be sent per unit of time measurement, aka clock speed.

 

[Pinhedd]

Yep, like all things Silicon has a finite limit. It's as I said, the absolute speed limit for a given material is based on how fast an electron can move through it. Faster your electrons move the shorter the time between signal generation and signal reception, aka signal propagation. The shorter that time the more signals can be sent per unit of time measurement, aka clock speed.

The electron speed has very little to do with it, electrons move very slowly. In semiconductors they barely move at all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_velocity

Electric fields on the other hand move extremely quickly (speed of light in a vacuum, just below that in unshielded wire, significantly lower in shielded wire). Imagine a crowded expressway, everyone wants to get home so everyone's trying to move forward. If one car exits the expressway then we can use the driver's anger to gauge how bad the traffic is. We can also assume that as one car leaves, another enters. Thus, for a signal to pass from one point to another the carriers themselves need not move the entire distance, only enough that the information itself be carried.

Electromagnetic waves function very similarly to material waves. If you wave a skipping rope up and down each point on the rope only ever moves up and down, but the material pushes and pulls on the material next to it which is in turn moving up and down. This is how a wave travels down a rope, in a pool, and in an electrical wire. It's also the reason why DC power is horrible for long distance transmission.

 

[palladin9479]

Is this guy (^) always like this?

 

[Pinhedd]

Is this guy (^) always like this?

yes

We don't want electrons to move quickly, we want them to move as slowly as electrically possible, and have has few of them move as possible, while still getting the information out of them that we need.