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Why gallium arsenide? It's quite fussy.

"This facility is the only secure site in the UK capable of manufacturing gallium arsenide semiconductors, a vital component in military platforms such as fighter jets."

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It's much more effective at extremely high frequencies used in compact radars, like the kind used on fighter jets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium_arsenide#GaAs_advantag...

Yea fo sho', and it was the Cray 3 supercomputer actually based on gallium arsenide at the time, meaning faaasssttt clock rates, about 6x faster than compeititors in terms of Hz. So that would be something like a 50 ghz processor today, wild

My phone is faster.

Your phone operates roughly 10x slower in terms of Hz.

According to page 10, the Cray 3's clock speed was 500 MHz: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Phones beat that by a factor of x2-x4.

And has 1-16 processors of 1 gigaflop each; depending on how much precision you want, a phone can beat that by a factor of just over x2000.

There was a whole Byte magazine dedicated to it back in the day. It was thought (at the time) that the only way we'd ever break the 1 GHz barrier was to use GaAs, which obviously turned out to be wrong.

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