The 500GHz chip has arrived, but there is still one obstacle to getting it on your desktop--it operates at a few degrees above absolute zero.
Room temperature performance isn't that bad either...
Instead of relying on pure silicon, the foundation material of modern semiconductors, the chips in the demonstration were made of silicon and germanium, using an increasingly popular combination of elements to improve speed. Even at room temperature, the chips can run as fast as 350 billion cycles, or gigahertz. In contrast, silicon-germanium chips in the current generation of cellphones run at about two gigahertz.
Wired calls it a "quantum leap".
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