Graphene Processor Chips to Reach 1000Ghz

Graphene might be the next material of choice for making processor chips, according to an MIT report. So, what’s so exciting about this? Well, Graphene chips could make for processors that run between 500GHz and 1,000GHz. That’s quite a leap from the current 5GHz chips, wouldn’t you say? We should see a commercial version of this technology within two years, according to MIT.

Discovered only in 2004, graphene is a flat one-atom thick sheet of carbon. It's one of the most exciting materials in Science and Technology as it’s the strongest and most reliable material ever discovered, and it has a great advantage over others: mobility, an electrical property which allows electrons to stir in the material.

The current research shows that a frequency multiplier could be created, which works to double a signal and likewise doubles a processor’s clocking speed. This is better than current frequency multiplication which produces a noisey signal that requires filtering to clean it up. The graphene chip allows much high frequency multiplication with less noise.

Although the study is at early stages, it has already drawn the attention of many other offices in the federal government and major chip-making companies and according to MIT, “it may take a year of work, maximum two” before the graphene chip enters in mass production.

I'm not sure if overclockers would still want to mess up with this one.

How to Upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7

It's quite difficult but doable. We all know that Microsoft seems to tell us that a Windows 7 upgrade is will only work from Windows Vista-based computers. Is this some kind of strategy Microsoft's playing on us loyal Windows XP users to purchase Vista before upgrading to Windows 7? I hope not. But if you're running XP, you may not be out of options.

Can we get around without purchasing and activating Windows Vista before upgrading to Windows 7? Yes we can. We have tried upgrading one old Windows XP machine over the weekend to Windows 7 Build 7000. It took us from morning till evening to wrap up the upgrade. But it's all worth it. We had the machine running Windows 7 without a glitch, at least until now.

We got a copy of a Vista promo installer to upgrade our Windows XP SP1 (yes SP1, we specifically want to try it on the earliest XP release, but should at least have Office 2007 on it). We were able to install Vista without entering any serial number. Afterwhich we installed the latest Windows 7 public beta, after waiting through a long installation process... It went in without any problem. We entered a legit serial number and activated it, crossing our fingers, it did. Everything's running without a hitch including Office 2007.

But then, this may not guarantee that everyone can have the same system installation experience when upgrading XP to Windows 7, most particularly with the final Windows 7 release. But this experience will at least tell us, at the very least that inspite of a difficult long process, Windows XP users can get their system upgraded to Windows 7 without the extra cost of purchasing a Windows Vista.