IBM labs outlines its gigahertz era

IBM has primed its customers, channel and competitors about new chip technology that is emerging from its labs, as well as new PCs and Internet devices that it has in the pipeline.

Big Blue claims the processor technology will enable it to build chips that require only half the power and run as much as five times faster than existing chips, at speeds of up to 4.5GHz.

Intel and AMD are also expected to announce PC chips that breach the 1GHz barrier later this year.

IBM's new Interlocked Pipelined Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (IP CMOS) circuit design technology is based on conventional silicon transistors, but also includes a distributed decentralised clock that uses locally generated clocks to run smaller sections of a circuit.

This enables faster sections of the circuits to run at higher cycles, without needing to wait for slower ones to catch up.

Stanley Schuster, a researcher at IBM, said that it becomes increasingly difficult to "maintain a synchronous clock across an entire chip as performance rises", and explained that the clock itself "can limit performance". He said: "We believe this new design will help us overcome those problems in future generations of high-speed chips."

Randall Isaac, IBM vice-president, claimed that such innovations in chip design - rather than just making parts smaller - would lead to the performance gains needed to bring about the era of gigahertz chips.

He added that Big Blue had other promising technologies in its laboratories, but refused to say when any of them would become available.

IBM also plans to roll out a raft of PCs in the spring, including the IBM Internet Appliance, an all-in-one flatpanel PC. It will also release a low-cost desktop, a Linux-based network station and a thin client that will fit on the back of a flatpanel monitor.

The products come under the banner of Project Eon (Edge of the Network) and are an attempt by Big Blue to turn its PC business into a profitable division.

Maria DeGiglio, an analyst at financial services company DH Andrews, said: "This is not just hardware and software, it's the tools, support and solutions. It's a huge undertaking and IBM is the one company that I'm certain can handle it."