Apple chip breakthrough confounds physicists
Posted by NTUsEr on 14 August 2002 - 18:40 · 37 comments & 175 views
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Apple claims that "the faster-than-light processor speed gets an additional boost with an advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast, dedicated memory with massively enhanced throughput."
Faster than light? Apparently so. Until now this achievement has been limited to small particles, such as photons, as apparently Feynman (a star of Apple's Think Different ads) suggested that the speed of light was only an average.
NEC researchers in Princeton, New Jersey, a beam of light through gas 300 times faster than the speed of light, which apparently "moved so fast that it appeared to exit from the chamber before it entered".
And a black hole in the M87 has been observed emitting jets at what appears to be six times the speed of light.
However, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity may need to be updated.
It posits that to travel faster than light requires an infinite amount of energy - which doubtless explains the presence of such a large heat sink in the new G4s. Although remarkably, Apple claims the machines run off a standard mains current.
NVIDIA enjoyed the benefits of a 0.13-micron design for NV30; they could promise higher clock speeds, more features and a smaller die size than the R300 while keeping power consumption and heat dissipation down to more manageable levels. The only risks would be if NVIDIA could not get the chip design ready in time or if TSMC's 0.13-micron yields were not high enough to produce the chip in a profitable fashion.
NVIDIA wasn't the only one that had to worry about yield; the massive size of ATI's R300 would almost guarantee that yields would be low on the chip. But when push came to shove, ATI was able to introduce their R300 on time and are a matter of days away from commencing with volume shipping of the first Radeon 9700 Pro boards. ATI did find a way to balance the yield issue by allowing their partners to produce a regular version of the Radeon 9700 with a lower core clock instead of the 325MHz clock of the Radeon 9700 Pro.
This leaves us with a very important question: where is NV30?