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Judging by details revealed in a chip conference agenda, the clock frequency race isn't over yet. IBM's Power6 processor will be able to exceed 5 gigahertz in a high-performance mode, and the second-generation Cell Broadband Engine processor from IBM, Sony and Toshiba will run at 6GHz, according to the program for the International Solid State Circuits Conference that begins February 11 in San Francisco. Chipmakers have run into problems increasing chip clock speed--essentially an electronic heartbeat that synchronizes operations in a processor--because higher frequencies have led to unmanageable power consumption and waste heat . To compensate, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have turned instead to the addition of multiple processing cores on each slice of silicon. That's effective when computers are juggling numerous tasks at the same time, but increasing the clock speed means an individual task can run faster. The first-generation Cell Broadband Engine chip,...

IBM has built a prototype storage device with two partners that they claim is 500 times faster than Flash. It uses less than half the power of Flash memory and can be built in ultra-thin form factors most likely unavailable to Flash. In short, a Flash-killer and potentially the answer for a universal memory type for mobile devices. Infineon spin-off Qimonda, and flash memory company Macronix will show the device at an IEEE conference in San Francisco this week. It uses a new germanium-antimony (GeSc) semi-conductor alloy in a device with a 3nm by 20nm cross-section - far smaller than today's flash and one predicted to be achieved in 2015 using Moore's Law extrapolations of chip component size. Dr TC Chen, an IBM Research VP, said: "Many expect flash memory to encounter significant scaling limitations in the near future. Today we unveil a new phase-change memory material that has high performance even in an extremely small volume." Most Flash memory used today has a ...

Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are all in a battle to get their product in your living room. Slice it how you may, there will be one definite winner in the next-gen marketplace; that winner is IBM, which designed and makes the microprocessors for all three units. Regardless of which console, IBM will be getting a cut of the profits. Read on... read more  |  digg story

By harnessing a processor originally built for the upcoming Sony PlayStation 3, IBM is building a new supercomputer that is expected to break the petaflop barrier by topping speedz of 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The new computer, code-named Roadrunner, is a joint project between IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it will be installed. Henry Brandt, a senior technical staff member with IBM, said the supercomputer will be built in two phases. The first phase, which cost Congress $35 million, is comprised of a base cluster that runs on the Linux operating system and uses IBM System x 3755 servers based on AMD Opteron technology. That phase is slated to be shipped to the national lab next month. But the computer's real speed boost will come in late in 2007 or early in 2008 when the second phase, which doesn't yet have a price tag, rolls out. At that point, the cluster will be upgraded with the addition of Cell processors, which were originally designed fo...

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Bucking a trend in the chip industry, IBM Corp. said Tuesday its upcoming Power6 microprocessor for servers will run at unprecedented speeds while keeping a lid on power requirements and heat. For years, chip makers have improved computer performance by shrinking the size of transistors, squeezing more of them into smaller spaces and ratcheting up the speed at which they process instructions. But recently the benefits have diminished as the chips' power requirements and temperatures have risen. To get around the problem, the industry has resorted to building two or more computing engines known as "cores" on a single chip and throttling back the clock speed to prevent a silicon meltdown. As a result, performance does increase — but it does not double, even with two computing cores. "In Power6, we basically combined everything we could (throw) at it in terms of fundamental atoms and molecules all the way out to what we knew would be the software tha...