It occured to me they don't say much about the performance of that 500Ghz chip except this:

From the BBC|News site
When cooled, the chips were able to perform half a trillion calculations every second, a speed of 500 GHz.

By comparison, a powerful desktop PC is capable of about five billion calculations per second.

What does that translate to Flops/Tflops? Anyway do the math and the chips over 100times the Ghz's of chips today so 100 times the 5Billion calculations of powerful desktop PC's and thats 500billion. Isn't that half a trillion?makes sense .Sorry only just woke up so don't ask me to do anything complicated.
But these days (as others here say) we see better improvements from new chip core designs and multicores ect. if/when we ever reach a time when we run at 500Ghz at home we should be getting far more performance than that.
At least theres this

At room temperature the experimental chips still managed to outperform standard silicon chips, running at about 350 billion calculations per second

Thought I'd post links to a couple related pages I happened across.

NeoSeeker article
TG Daily article

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dang, now that is impressive!


*drool*

what the heck would we use it for?

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dang, now that is impressive!


*drool*

what the heck would we use it for?

It'd be great for controlling a bipedal robot (or an impressive battle bot with an assortment of deployable weapons).

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

I wonder what a theoretical upper limit on switching is.

I'd have to venture the "length" of an electron wave/particle, with a space somewhere near equivalent to that dimension, divided into a 1 light second length would give one a theoretical upper limit.

Okay...now I guess I'll go figure that out.....

How many Googolhertz will that be? rofl

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Germanium exotic???
The *first* transistors were made of germanium!
Even before that, the original "crystal" radios used germanium crystals!
There's nothing exotic about germanium. Maybe in the way they use it, but sure not in the material itself! Talk about going back to the roots! Haha.

I remember those..you had the 15 or 20' long wire antenna...and a transistor to help boost the signal coming through the diode. Then you also had a wound air-core tuner......

Uh-oh...I just put an age on myself! rofl

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Germanium exotic???
The *first* transistors were made of germanium!
Even before that, the original "crystal" radios used germanium crystals!
There's nothing exotic about germanium. Maybe in the way they use it, but sure not in the material itself! Talk about going back to the roots! Haha.

I remember those..you had the 15 or 20' long wire antenna...and a transistor to help boost the signal coming through the diode. Then you also had a wound air-core tuner......

Uh-oh...I just put an age on myself! rofl

The "crystal" radio I'm talking about didn't even use a transistor. My dad use to tell me he built one of the "cat-whisker" radios when he was young. It had just a rock crystal that he dug up in the field and a coil of wire. "Tuning" was done by turning a knob that the "cat-whisker) was attached to, which changed it's position on the face of the crystal. Of course tuning by this method was very "hit or miss" but it worked.

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Jim

Some people plan their life out and look back at the wealth they've had.
Others live life day by day and look back at the wealth of experiences and enjoyment they've had.

I read an analysis that indicated that you had to divide the frequency of the transistors by about 10 to get the clock speed of the computer. Still, a 50GHz CPU is nothing to sneeze at.

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BOINC WIKI

I read an analysis that indicated that you had to divide the frequency of the transistors by about 10 to get the clock speed of the computer. Still, a 50GHz CPU is nothing to sneeze at.

Actually the ratio is ~1/5 on average and is based on the fact that it takes ~ 5 transistors in sequence to carry out many of the functions one expects to see in a CPU.

As I've said before, I'm certain that 20 years from now people will be hanging around tech watering holes like this one wondering "is 4THz really the limit in CPU clock rate"?

...and 4THz will not be the end of the clock rate increases either.

Based on physical limits, we have another 450-550 =years= of CPU performance improvements at the current pace of "Moore's Law" before we =really= hit the wall.

450*12/24=> computers 2^225 more powerful than what we presently have...

...maybe we haven't found ET becuase he doesn't want to be found and has tech so outrageously advanced that he can successfuly hide from us if he wants to.
Until we catch up ;-)

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