IBM, GIT overclock chip to 500GHz
Posted Jun 20th 2006 10:49AM by Evan Blass
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
If you were wowed by those Japanese modders who overclocked their
stock CPU to 7GHz, wait till you hear about IBM's latest foray into
the world of ultra-fast computing: together with researchers from
the digital camera-hating Georgia Institute of Technology, Big Blue
has managed to overclock a chip to an unheard of 500GHz. Granted,
the model they used already had a blistering native clock speed of
350GHz to begin with, but we're still floored that you could
actually coax a small silicon wafer into operating at an incredible
half-terahertz. As you probably suspected, there's no way to
achieve speeds like this at room temperature, so the team froze
their high-performance silicon-germanium chip to a super-chilly
negative 451-degrees Fahrenheit, which is just eight degrees above
absolute zero. Unfortunately, after learning about this
breakthrough, electronics giant Sony apparently felt that consumers
would no longer be impressed with their much-hyped Cell processor,
so they've once again delayed the PS3 until IBM can make the liquid
helium-cooled CPUs suitable for mass production . Expect the 500GHz
PS3 to hit stores sometime in 2011.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/20/ibm-git-overclock-cpu-to-500ghz/
