The microprocessor continues its way up the megahertz ladder, with IBM researchers announcing that they have demonstrated a processor running at 1 billion cycles per second - or 1,000 MHz.
The announcement, which IBM will detail in a paper to be presented at the upcoming International Solid State Circuit Conference in San Francisco, follows the announcement of a similarly fast processor just two days ago.
Digital Equipment Corp. said on Monday that its Alpha family of chips for high-powered workstation and servers will surpass 1,000 MHz.
In contrast to today's PC chips clocking in under 300 MHz, chips based on new 1,000-MHz, or 1-GHz (gigahertz), technologies would feature "clock" speeds (the cycles per second measurement) of roughly three times today's fastest PCs.
These chips would see their most immediate impact in speeding up the processor-intensive work of busy servers and high-end computer workstations (used, for example, in creating special effects, computer-aided design, high-end 3-D graphics, and so on).
Meanwhile, Intel, which says it will be making some announcements of its own at the ISSCC conference, says it expects to be launching 550-MHz chips for PCs by the end of this year. In contrast, the 1,000-MHz technologies from DEC and IBM aren't due for commercial production for at least two years.
The experimental processor IBM has demonstrated is produced using the conventional Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) process, as is DEC's Alpha technology. As the industry standard for silicon fabrication, CMOS chips can be produced more cheaply than circuits assembled using less conventional methods.
IBM's Austin Research Lab is responsible for the development of the new technology. As a statement by the lab's director indicates, demonstration is just a first step in making a commercial technology viable. "With this demonstration, we believe it is possible to design 1,000-MHz products," said Mark Dean, director of the Austin Research Lab, in a press release.
The company's demonstration reportedly achieved clock speeds of up to 1,100 MHz. The chip contains 1 million transistors and was based on 0.25-micron CMOS technology already used to manufacture existing IBM chips.
