IBM and Georgia Tech announced a new 350 gig chip (room temp) that would download a complete movie in 5 seconds. At -350 degrees the speed is 500 gigs. They said it will be a few years in developement because they do not know how it works.
JJK
Hmmm. How does a chip download a movie? Wouldn't that require a network connection of some sort? How large is the movie file? One of the movies sitting here on my shelf is only about 4 minutes long. Compressed to 56K WMV it's only about 1MB. 5 seconds is SLOW for that kind of download. On the other hand, "The Return of the King" (to pick an example at random) is 208 minutes long. An uncompressed 1080 24p version of it would be around 1.7TB. To download that in 5 seconds would require just about all the fibre networks in North America working in parallel on that one job. I doubt any chip could handle that.
And ... 350 gig what? gigahertz? gigabytes? giganoodles?
It looks like if that's all they had to say about it then they surely don't know much about it at all. ;)
It's actually the transistor that's so fast, not the chip, if I read the article correctly.
"After cooling down a silicon-germanium chip to approximately 451 degrees Fahrenheit below 0, or 4.5 kelvin, Georgia Tech was able to clock the transistor at 500-GHz, versus a speed of about 350-GHz at room temperature. "
And, as I read it, there is no mention of downloading anything, merely the implication of throughput.