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IBM breaks 1,000 MHz
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February 4, 1998: 1:48 p.m. ET
Big Blue's chip triples speed of today's models, but won't be available soon
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Engineers at an International Business Machines Corp. research facility in Austin, Texas, Wednesday demonstrated the world's first computer chip to break the 1,000 MHz barrier.
The chip operates at 1 billion cycles per second. The fastest commercial microprocessors today operate at around 300 MHz. However, computer users won't be able to run out and buy a PC containing the chip anytime soon. IBM isn't expected to make it available commercially for at least two years.
The news comes just days after rival Digital Equipment introduced a new version of its Alpha chip that it said would break the 1,000 MHz barrier. Digital Equipment, which hasn't yet hit that mark, also said it would take at least two years for the chip to be available.
IBM will issue a research paper detailing the chip, along with two related microprocessor papers, at the International Solid State Circuit Conference in San Francisco Friday.
IBM said it eventually will apply its recently introduced copper chip technology to the 1,000 MHz microprocessor.
  
The team working at IBM's Austin research lab said several achievements led to the faster speed, including
- The combination of addition and rotation operations into a single circuit.
- A reduction in the number of stages that signals must go through along the chip.
- Changes in the timing signal, or "clock," that regulates the speed of the chip's cycle.
IBM said the experimental chip originally was designed at its research lab but was fabricated at its plant in Fishkill, N.Y.
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IBM
Digital Equipment
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