Graphene CPU from Intel Reaches 100Ghz

MIT research is cutting edge.  While not yet of the commercial variety, the trickle down effect eventually comes into our current technologies, as they were all lab based at one point in time. It may be 5 to 10 years before we see 500 Ghz CPUs pop up, but we can still dream.

According to an MIT article,

New research findings at MIT could lead to microchips that operate at much higher speeds than is possible with today’s standard silicon chips, leading to cell phones and other communications systems that can transmit data much faster.

The key to the superfast chips is the use of a material called graphene, a form of pure carbon that was first identified in 2004. Researchers at other institutions have already used the one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms to make prototype transistors and other simple devices, but the latest MIT results could open up a range of new applications.

The MIT researchers built an experimental graphene chip known as a frequency multiplier, meaning it is capable of taking an incoming electrical signal of a certain frequency – for example, the clock speed that determines how fast a computer chip can carry out its computations – and producing an output signal that is a multiple of that frequency. In this case, the MIT graphene chip can double the frequency of an electromagnetic signal.

Frequency multipliers are widely used in radio communications and other applications. But existing systems require multiple components, produce “noisy” signals that require filtering and consume large power, whereas the new graphene system has just a single transistor and produces, in a highly efficient manner, a clean output that needs no filtering.

Intel has to get in on this action as they start testing the first graphene wrapped CPUs and ramp up to 100Ghz.   Engadget has an article about it. So, along with Light Peak, Intel seems to keep raising the bell curve on technology advancement. Wiki excerpt below:

“Light Peak is Intel‘s code-name for a new high-speed optical cable technology designed to connect electronic devices to each other in a peripheral bus. It has the capability to deliver high bandwidth, starting at 10 Gbps, with the potential ability to scale to 100 Gbps. It is intended as a single universal replacement for current buses such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, and HDMI. In comparison to these buses, Light Peak is much faster, longer ranged, smaller, and more flexible in terms of protocol support.

May be one day, with 500-1000 Ghz processors, speech recognition in any dialectic would be effortlessly understood, bringing on a renaissance  in computer interactions, and a revolution in productivity worldwide.

Light Peak was developed as a way to reduce the proliferation of ports on modern computers. Bus systems like USB were intended to do the same, and successfully replaced a number of older technologies like RS232 and Centronics printer ports. However, increasing bandwidth demands have led to the introduction of a new series of high-performance systems like E-SATA and DisplayPort that USB and similar systems could not address. Light Peak provides enough bandwidth to allow all of these systems to be driven over a single type of interface, and in many cases on a single cable using a daisy chain.”