Gavin writes:
> Glenn writes:
>  > Just over a week ago, IBM unveiled a 1 GHz (1,000 MHz) PowerPC processor.
>
>  Actually, I'm pretty sure it was just a research processor, not a real
>  PowerPC implementation (though the news.com article suggests otherwise).
>  I believe this is the first complete processor that is able to run (at
>  room temperature anyway) this fast, but I got the idea that it's only a
>  proof of concept and not yet very close to being an actual product.
>
>  IBM's press release is at: http://www.ibm.com/News/1998/02/ls980204.html
>

What a difference a week can make. Today, IBM broke even those bounds. It
announced plans to start work on a 10,000 MHz processor. The story appeared on
the Reuters newswire and is repeated in part below:

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Reuters

SOMERS, N.Y., (Feb 13) - International Business Machines Corp. said Friday it
signed an $85 million contract to build the world's fastest supercomputer.

The computer giant said it won the contract from the U.S. Department of Energy
and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory located in Livermore, Calif.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Federico Pena announced the contract Thursday in a
speech at the National Press Club in Washington.

The IBM RS/6000 SP, the technology behind Deep Blue's successful challenge of
chess grand master Garry Kasparov, will be capable of 10 trillion calculations
per second upon its installation at Livermore in the year 2000.

The computer, when complete, will be capable of calculating in a single second
what would take 10 million years using a hand-held calculator.

The contract, announced under the DOE's Accelerated Strategic Computing
Initiative (ASCI), is the third IBM award in a program designed to build
systems capable of tera-scale (trillion calculations-per-second) computing,
IBM said.

These systems will enable the DOE to conduct complex modeling and simulation
to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile in the
absence of nuclear testing.

This new technology will also offer the DOE an eight-fold increase in
simulation detail compared to what is available today.

''Banks, retailers, insurers, manufacturers, health care, and communications
providers are among the industries that stand to benefit from technological
advances resulting from ASCI,'' the company said in a statement.

REUTERS Reut07:42 02-13-98

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Wirt Atmar