Re:Rosetta: The Engine Behind Cray’s Slingshot Exascale-Era ...
by jiggawatts on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @07:21AM
(#23089756)
That's not entirely true. Well, it is true that you can't get better chips with much higher clocks commercially, but there are specialist vendors making digital circuitry with crazy high clock speeds, and the primary market is the military.
For example, the Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) logic uses superconducting circuitry and experimental chips have hit 1 THz for simple ADC/DAC circuits, and I've heard of 100 GHz DSP chips in practical use. They're typically used for radio telescope amplifiers and digitisers, large static military radar installations, etc...
People sometimes forget that the commodity market seeks a kind of Pareto Frontier optimisation where "cost effectiveness" and "low risk manufacturing" are key metrics. If you don't care about any of that and just want the maximum performance at any cost, there's some amazing technologies out there!
For example, the Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) logic uses superconducting circuitry and experimental chips have hit 1 THz for simple ADC/DAC circuits, and I've heard of 100 GHz DSP chips in practical use. They're typically used for radio telescope amplifiers and digitisers, large static military radar installations, etc...
People sometimes forget that the commodity market seeks a kind of Pareto Frontier optimisation where "cost effectiveness" and "low risk manufacturing" are key metrics. If you don't care about any of that and just want the maximum performance at any cost, there's some amazing technologies out there!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_single_flux_quantum