Some technological advances in today's news: on the horizon: faster clock speeds, and faster disk drives. With IBM currently marketing a 380mb 66mhz computer the size of a postage stamp for $1500, (and that's technology they announced a year ago!) what will we see in five years? Can an alternative to the CD be far behind? ================================================================================================== By Tom Jacobs Monday, December 11, 2000 Chip giants IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) both announced breakthrough chip technologies. IBM has started using a new manufacturing technology, while Intel promises transistors as small as three atoms thick, making chips almost seven times faster than its recently released Pentium 4. IBM's new manufacturing technique, named CMOS-9S, showcases advances in copper wiring, silicon-on-insulator transistors, and better insulation so that chip circuits can be as small as 0.13 microns -- 800 times thinner than a human hair. IBM is making a variety of chips with this technique, and customers should receive their first shipments in early 2001. But Intel now plans the world's smallest and fastest CMOS transistor. At 30 nanometers thick, the Santa Clara gorilla could fit 400 million of them on a chip, which is just shy of 10 times the number on a Pentium 4. Intel says that it will be possible to build chips by 2005 that run 10 billion operations a second, compared to the Pentium 4's 1.5 billion a second. Dr. Sunlin Chu, vice president and general manager of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group, said that new processors using the transistors not only would be smaller and faster, but use less power. He said, "It's one thing to achieve a great technological breakthrough. It's another to have one that is practical and will change everyone's lives. With Intel's 30 nanometer transistor, we have both." While industry observers believe that this advance approaches the limit on thickness, Jim Hardy, an analyst at Dataquest, says that "This is proving there's no reason the normal growth of the semiconductor industry can't continue on for probably another 10 years." If so, that's good news for Intel investors, who have endured recent Intel revenue warnings and stock price cliff-drops. Fools recently dueled over its future.