Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 15:16:36 06/29/00
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Predicting a limit is stupid. There's a well-known quote from a HIGHLY regarded magazine, Microprocessor Report, saying that clock speeds would never exceed 33MHz. Everybody thought that 50MHz was the practical limit until Intel started clock-doubling their chips. (Back in the day, clock doubling was sort of considered cheating. Now clocks are more than quintupled!) There's been some noise about 0.12 micron being a limit due to the wavelength of light, but there have been a number of processes announced that are capable of 0.08 micron fabrication, down to 0.02. EM emissions (e.g. radio waves) depend on the flow of current, which depends on voltages and component size. You can't just name some arbitrary frequency and say it's a limit. If you had a low-power chip with 0.02 micron dimensions, running at several gigahertz would be no problem. I don't see why you're so disappointed that processor clock speed is increasing. Were you also annoyed when clock speed went higher than, say, 16MHz? -Tom On June 29, 2000 at 16:33:00, Graham Laight wrote: >My opinion is that the continuing advancement of speed is delaying the day when >computer manufacturers have to start seriously thinking about how to make >machines with huge numbers of processors cheaply and effectively. > >I remember a couple of years ago Robert Hyatt saying that 1 GHz would be the >limit of speed, because above this signals emit too many radio waves. I am >disappointed that he has been proven wrong. Could any electronic engineers out >there hazard a guess as to where the limit really will be reached, please? > >-g > >On June 28, 2000 at 20:31:30, Michael Neish wrote: > >> >>Sorry if this is old news on this board, but I just read that the Pentium 4 is >>now out, clocking at 1.5 GHz. >> >>Any comments? >> >>Cheers, >> >>Mike. >> >>P.S.: >> >>Read it at the BBC Web site. >> >>http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_810000/810678.stm
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