IBM goes for speed with experimental 1,000-MHz chip
By Steven E. Brier
InfoWorld Electric

IBM has broken the 1GHz barrier for chips, the company announced Wednesday, following a similar announcement Monday from Digital.

IBM has a working prototype of the experimental CMOS processor, but is not expected to have shipping product for two years, according to the company.

"With this demonstration, we believe it is possible to design 1000-MHz products," Mark Dean, director of IBM's Austin Research Lab, at which the chip was developed, stated in a release.

An IBM spokesman said the 1GHz chip was based on existing technologies using the PowerPC as the platform. He said the company expected a 25 percent to 30 percent improvement when using the copper chip and other newer technologies.

IBM's chip is based on its existing 0.25-micron aluminum technology, opening the way for further improvements when the 0.18-micron copper technology announced last year becomes widely available.

Digital's announcement of its new Alpha 21264 chip family Monday said that the chips would operate at 1GHz by 2000, but did not indicate whether the company had a working version.

A paper detailing the IBM's achievement will be presented Friday at the annual IEEE International Solid State Circuit Conference in San Francisco.

IBM is also presenting two related microprocessor papers at the conference. One describes a commercial multithreaded RISC processor demonstrating IBM's ability to use innovative microarchitecture technology in a commercial application. The other describes IBM's first use of copper technology on a product level design with the PowerPC 750 microprocessor.