SAN FRANCISCO -- Not every week brings exciting news for fans of semiconductors, but this week is one that all electrical engineering majors are sure to relish.
On Monday both Intel and IBM announced chip advances that they say will significantly speed up computing processes -- and during the next few days, at separate conferences, each will show why they're keeping pace with Moore's Law.
That law says computing power doubles every eighteen months, and Craig Barrett, Intel's CEO, said Monday that keeping technology moving at that pace is the tech sector's only way to ditch the recession.
"The best is still ahead of us," said Barrett, during his keynote speech at the Intel Developer's Forum here on Monday. It might have seemed like a meaningless bit of pep-talk had his company not announced, earlier in the day, a new Pentium 4 Xeon server chip that will one day boast speeds of up to 10 GHz and feature a process called simultaneous multi-threading, or, as Intel calls it, "hyper-threading."
Essentially, this hyper-threading makes one processor look, to a computer's OS, like two chips -- and that significantly speeds up a system's response time.
Intel's Xeon chip will be the first commercially available processor to use this technology. The news of this advance, however, was somewhat obscured by IBM's announcement on Monday that it had created the "world's fastest microchip," as Reuters reported it.
IBM's new chip will run at a mind-boggling 110 GHz, thanks to its use of a silicon germanium semiconductor. Most commercially available chips use only silicon.
"This is reality here. Reality is 110 gigahertz," said Frank Dzubeck, president of consulting group Communications Network Architects, in an interview with Reuters.
But the 110 GHz spec is, at best, a little confounding. The chip is only a communications processor. That means its only use is in moving data -- such as the rivers of information that flow through Internet routers and cellular phone networks -- and not in processing the data, which, in the end, is what counts.
Still, according to Michael Loughran, a spokesman for IBM, such a chip should significantly raise the speed of general network communications. "This could theoretically process 3 million pages of text per second as it moves across a network," he said, which is about twice as fast as current chip speeds.
But Loughran said that IBM is not making any chips with this technology; it is, instead, letting other chipmakers "peek behind the curtain" at the technology and use it in their production.
He said the test proves that the company's silicon germanium process is viable. And indeed, IBM also announced on Monday that it is incorporating an older version of that technology in a new chip aimed at wireless devices.
Eventually, the new 110 GHz technology may also trickle down from routers to cell phones, Loughran said.
Reuters contributed to this report.
