Have you not heard that they discovered a way to use graphene as a one to one replacement for copper in chip production. That alone will allow speeds of 12-15GHz.
I would put faster chips using multicore running at many times current speeds will be available by 2011-2012 at near 100% certainty.
Have you not heard that they discovered a way to use graphene as a one to one replacement for copper in chip production. That alone will allow speeds of 12-15GHz.
Let’s assume they put it into practice and start mass-producing processors with graphene interconnects with better-than-copper resistivity. We’ve got two things to worry about here: speed and power.
The speed of signal propagation along a wire depends on RC, the product of the resistance and the capacitance. Graphene lowers the resistance of a wire of a given size, but does nothing to lower the capacitance—that depends on the insulator surrounding the wire and the shape of the wire and its proximity to other wires. The speed gains from graphene look moderate, but significant.
The power dissipated by sending signals through wires will be most of the power of future processors, if current trends continue. Power is a barrier to clocking chips fast. We can overclock processors a lot, but you’ve got to worry about them burning up. Decreasing resistivity improves the power situation somewhat, but the bulk of the interconnect’s influence on power comes from its capacitance. Transistors have to charge and discharge the capacitance of the wires, and that takes power. So on power, graphene will help somewhat, but it’s not the slam-dunk that Valkyrie Ice is expecting.
tl;dr: Graphene interconnect sounds good, but not fantastic.
Thank you—I was wanting to write something along similar lines in response to Valkyrie Ice’s comment, but wouldn’t have ended up with something this compact.
I’ll add that clocking is just a piece of the puzzle when it comes to making computers that compute faster.
Have you not heard that they discovered a way to use graphene as a one to one replacement for copper in chip production. That alone will allow speeds of 12-15GHz.
I would put faster chips using multicore running at many times current speeds will be available by 2011-2012 at near 100% certainty.
This seems to be still very far from application, a quick search on your claim turned up only this paper that isn’t cited by anybody yet, publicized in a few popular articles.
Let’s assume they put it into practice and start mass-producing processors with graphene interconnects with better-than-copper resistivity. We’ve got two things to worry about here: speed and power.
The speed of signal propagation along a wire depends on RC, the product of the resistance and the capacitance. Graphene lowers the resistance of a wire of a given size, but does nothing to lower the capacitance—that depends on the insulator surrounding the wire and the shape of the wire and its proximity to other wires. The speed gains from graphene look moderate, but significant.
The power dissipated by sending signals through wires will be most of the power of future processors, if current trends continue. Power is a barrier to clocking chips fast. We can overclock processors a lot, but you’ve got to worry about them burning up. Decreasing resistivity improves the power situation somewhat, but the bulk of the interconnect’s influence on power comes from its capacitance. Transistors have to charge and discharge the capacitance of the wires, and that takes power. So on power, graphene will help somewhat, but it’s not the slam-dunk that Valkyrie Ice is expecting.
tl;dr: Graphene interconnect sounds good, but not fantastic.
Thank you—I was wanting to write something along similar lines in response to Valkyrie Ice’s comment, but wouldn’t have ended up with something this compact.
I’ll add that clocking is just a piece of the puzzle when it comes to making computers that compute faster.