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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF
COMS 0.00130-67.5%Nov 7 11:47 AM EST
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To: Moonray who wrote (11381)1/7/1998 9:43:00 PM
From: Pullin-GS  Read Replies (2) of 22053
 
Yes, they indeed do have the internal clock speed barriors licked for the next 10 years or so using IBM's new chip manufacturing process (no longer requiring aluminum) of using copper and/or gold internal conductors.

But the external clock speeds are still dictated by physics of physical size (latencies) and ciruitboard trace capacitances/inductances which limit these speeds to about 100Mhz in most applications. It is the external clock speed which dictates how fast data is fed to the processor from memory for processing, and how fast instructions are sent from the CPU to other sub-processors on the motherboard (video, disk, etc.).

This can be compared to putting a ferarri engine in a car with the airodynmics of a brick. The whole package needs to be tuned as well. including:
1)Faster support logic
2)A mass storage technology that is at least 10X magnitude faster in access and seek times of current magnetic storage....solid state mass storage would correct this....we are close I think to seeing this.
3)An integrated DRAM/CPU package, allowing for CPU to RAM bus speeds approaching that of what the CPU is clocked at. Perhaps this could be a sealed RISC-based/memory micro-motherboard package.
4)A wider data path...this is easy....first there was 4, then 8, 16, 32, 64 bit processors. Why not 128, 256, etc?
5)controlling the environment of the silicon in the CPU (make them colder)....there are solid-state cooling devices.
6)Faster network controllers....this is happening now...802.3xxx (Ethernet) scales very well to fast applications as has been proven with 100Mbps and 1MMMbps service. New medias are helping as well.
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