IBM triples transistor performance with germanium
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IBM has successfully demonstrated a new technique for improving transistor performance that will help the company build smaller, more powerful chips in the next decade, company researchers said yesterday.
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Chipmaker's speedy Pentium 4 gets even faster.
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AMD and IBM today announced that they have developed a new and unique strained silicon transistor technology aimed at improving processor performance and power efficiency.
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AMD and IBM announced a collaborative breakthrough in processor technology today, marking the first use of two new techniques that advance speed and performance without requiring more power.
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(InfoWorld) - IBMÂ is pulling out the heavy artillery in its quest to build custom chips for both telephony backbone and handheld wireless devices, announcing a processor family built with silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology that is usually reserved for server processors. By borrowing SOI technology from its line of Power server chips -- includingÂ the top-shelf Power6Â -- IBM will achieve a 30 percent performance gain compared to chips using standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology, the company said Tuesday. And by building it on a scale of 45-nanometer feature sizes, IBM will achieve higher performance than comparable 65nm chips. IBM will launch this Cu-45HP (high performance) custom chip in early 2008, intended for manufacturers of switches and routers as well as cellphones and portable gaming systems. IBM will design a customized version of the ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) for each new client platform, said Bernard Meyerson, an IBM fellow and chief technology officer for IBM's Systems and Technology Group. The company already builds ASICs for the telephony market, but the new design will allow it to create more powerful designs in less time and at lower cost, he said. To boost power-efficiency, IBM is using 45-nm architecture embedded DRAM (dynamic RAM) instead of SRAM (static RAM) in the chip. Although DRAM has three to four times more memory density than SRAM, the company has never before used it for on-chip data storage because it is "pathetically slow," Meyerson said. IBM solved that problem with a recent advance that improves DRAM read/write data access speeds. Chips run faster and use less electricity when they use data stored on the processor itself instead of fetching that data from another location on the circuit board, he said. Once it launches the new chip, IBM expects to quickly reach full manufacturing capacity. Although the chip uses a new combination of technologies, IBM already builds processors with each of the components, such as the SOI-based processors it makes for gaming consoles including Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, and Nintendo's Wii. Despite the new features, IBM is announcing the Cu-45HP at a challenging time in the global chip market. Worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $19.9 billion in April, showing a decline from March as average selling prices continued to drop, according to a report released Monday by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). From January through April, sales were down by nearly 2 percent from the same period of 2006, the report said. The revenue slump occurred because prices have sunk faster than a modest rise in demand for consumer electronics. That consumer demand has bolstered the number of unit shipments in the market, but chip makers are collecting less money because of tumbling prices for many types of chips, including microprocessors, DRAMs and NAND flash, according to the SIA. Also on Tuesday, IBM announced new digital and analog semiconductors for mobile handsets and other wireless products. They include the SiGe BiCMOS 5PAe, a silicon-germanium-based analog product for making efficient power amplifiers in cell phones and WiMAX applications, the SiGe BiCMOS 6WL, an entry-level version of the company's existing technology for high-volume consumer electronics including cell phones and GPS (global positioning system) devices, and the CMOS 11LP, a product design to improve power efficiency in handset design. IBM is selling the 6WL design kits now, and plans to launch the other two products later in 2007. Â
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IBM says it is developing new  circuitry that could triple the data stored on a typical  microprocessor, and thereby double the performance of  computers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
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The chipmaker's 3 Series chipset promises computer users a serious performance boost.
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TechWeb - With a peak performance of 460 giga floating point operations per second, a single BladeCenter chassis of QS21s can achieve 6.4 TeraFLOPS, IBM claims.
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IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Blue Gene/L, which is being installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recaptured the supercomputer speed record that Silicon Graphics' (NYSE: SGI) Columbia system at NASA held for barely a week.
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IBM is the first PC manufacturer to use a National Semiconductor chip that stores a PC&#39;s identity in silicon to avert hackers by safeguarding passwords and other sensitive identity information.
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We're sure. Kinda Not satisfied with flexing its machismo through the zippy 4.0+GHz Power6 chip, IBM appears to have a couple rather radical notions in mind to improve its Unix server performance over the next couple of years.â¦
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The computing technologies to go beyond Moore's Law
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Companies will use strained silicon to boost transistor speed.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. has taken a large stride in its race with Intel Corp. to make faster, smaller chips by building silicon transistors from a rare combination of metals. Both companies announced in January that they had discovered theÂ special materials needed to build "high-k metal gate" transistors. The special materials are much better insulators than standard silicon dioxide, a crucial trait as chip designers struggle to fit more and more transistors on each microprocessor, since electricity tends to leak from the closely-packed wires, making them hot and inefficient. Until now, neither company had announced the ingredients of this new mix of materials. But IBM researchers said on Monday they had used their Blue Gene supercomputer to model 50 combinations of hafnium dioxide and basic silicon. The company plans to build chips based on the new mixture in 2008. The new material looked good in theory, but IBM engineers had to create simulations of different mixtures to avoid any surprises when they added it to semiconductor production lines, said Alessandro Curioni, a supercomputing expert at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. Curioni was one of three authors who published this research in a paper published in the January edition of the scientific journal Physical Review Letters. The team used new algorithms and a Blue Gene/L supercomputer with 4,096 processors to crunch the numbers. The program took about five days to run a simulation for each combination of ingredients, modeling the interaction between individual particles for the 600 atoms in every model. If the researchers had used a typical notebook PC, the 250-day job would have taken them 700 years, he said. Despite IBM's advance, Intel insists it is on track to reach markets first with chips using its own type of "high-k metal gate" transistors. Intel plans to use the technology in a family of 45-nanometer architecture chips scheduled for launch later in 2007, the company said. Â
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Engineers from IBM, AMD, Sony and Toshiba have developed a strained silicon transistor technology aimed at improving processor performance and power efficiency with up to a 24 percent transistor speed increase.
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AMD and IBM have developed a strained silicon transistor technology which the firms believe will dramatically increase processor performance.
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AMD and IBM in collaboration have developed a new technology that can lead to massive increase in processor power. They call it strained silicon transistor and tests have shown it resulted in a 24% increase in performance.