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Intel Says 10GHz By 2005
Techman writes: "After breaking the 1GHz barrier just this year, how long do you think it will take before we reach 5GHz? What about 10GHz? Intel is predicting that it will be sooner than you think. AnandTech has a look at the future of Intel manufacturing to see not only if the 0.13-micron Pentium 4 has a chance at success but also if Intel can make 10GHz processors a reality."
OK, so it's:
:-)
Intel:
2000,5: 1 Ghz
2002 : 2 Ghz
2003,5: 4 Ghz
2005 : 8 Ghz
But also, it's:
AMD:
2000,5: 1,5 Ghz
2002 : 3 Ghz
2003,5: 6 Ghz
2005 : 12 Ghz
Of course, if you count everything Intel stops before shipping, they can make this progress too. But then again, I made a 1 Thz chip. I just recalled it before shipping
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Anyway, it seems Intel's reasonably confident of doing 0.07-micron (and to do it in production in 2005, they must already be doing it in the research lab now). I wonder how confident they are of going smaller again in 2007-8?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Moore's law predicted transistor density, not speed, and is only rather approximate. If you interpret it as speed doubling every 18 months (or quadrupling every 3 years), then based on the 2 MHz 8080 in 1974, we should now have half terahertz CPUs.
1974 2 Mhz
1977 8 Mhz
1980 32 Mhz
1983 128 Mhz
1986 512 Mhz
1989 2048 Mhz
1992 8192 Mhz
1995 32768 Mhz
1998 131072 Mhz
2001 524288 Mhz
Obviously that doesn't hold very well. If you want to do some kludged curve fitting based on Intel's history, here are some data points.
1986 16 MHz i386 DX
1989 25 MHz i486 DX
1993 66 MHz Pentium
1996 150 MHz Pentium Pro
1997 200 MHz Pentium II
1999 500 MHz Pentium III
2001 1500 MHz Pentium IV
The 1.5 MHz Pentium IV was an unusually large leap. In a kludged algorithm, you could interpret that as an accellerating pace, or as a leap that's likely to be followed by a lull. So really, it doesn't tell you much, except that Intel's prediction seems optimistic based solely on historical trends.
Well, having taken a few computer architecture courses, I'll testify to the fact that Hz is not the only possible measure of performance. In fact, it can be pretty misleading. You can increase the cycles-per-second by making each instruction take more cycles to complete, a tradeoff which may or may not give you more instructions-per-second. Also, how many operations you can perform with each instruction is Really Important. These G4s may only do 500 MHz, but they are, I understand, rated at at least one gigaflop. That means two floating point operations per cycle! I don't know much about Mac architecture at the chip level, but that sounds to me like superscalar architecture!
This makes me curious. Has anyone gotten an estimate of performance on the 1GHz processors vs. the G4 Gigaflop processors in BogoMIPS, using Linux and LinuxPPC? BogoMIPS isn't a perfect measure of speed either, but it gives a pretty good estimate.
---
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
How far does electricity travel through a wire in one ten-billionth of a second? -jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
And yes I do own a mac, but I think I speak for a majority of the macintosh comunity, being at 500 mhz for 2 years is kinda shitty.
True indeed. I posted while it was yet early in the morning. Not necessarily useful, except perhaps at the kernel level, but interesting as a mere curiosity. Thanks for the reminder.
---
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Okay, using Moore's revised law (an increase by a factor of 2 every 18 months), and the current speeds of about 1 Ghz, that gives us 4 Ghz by the end of 2003, 8 Ghz by the middle of 2004, and 16 Ghz by the end of 2006. Why should we be surprised that we'll hit 10 Ghz in 2005? Besides, given Intel's strategy with the P3 of getting mind numbing clock speeds without actually improving performance substantially, it should be even easier.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Check this story out... :-/
For those too lazy to read it, it basically says that the P4 will only run Redhat and TurboLinux. Kinda odd how the most commercialized distros work w/ the P4
In fact, forget the clock. The purpose of the clock is to slow the system down! A huge amount of the circuitry of modern CPUs is devoted to getting the clock to synchronise everything. Asynchronous circuitry doesn't waste all that space, and goes faster. Exits, muttering something about a new paradigm...
The original Doctor Dark.
might be better to have a nice big memory leak there, instead of just loading up the stack.
void ThreadFunc(void* p)
{
const int nBigMem = 4096000;
char *foo = malloc(nBigMem)
}
also that infinant loop would have made the only one thread swapping memory around a lot.. this is much worse
void PaperClip()
{
while(1)
begin_thread(ThreadFunc, 0);
}
and while we're at it, lets make this one infinante, gar-un-tee'ing an application crash!, wo-hoo!
-Jon
this is my sig.
Propagation of the lack of light travels at the speed of light
Speaking of propagation, another factor that would have to be taken into consideration here is the propagation delay of the various logic gates that will be inside the CPU. Logic gates don't change state instantly; they take time to change, and this needs to be taken into careful consideration, especially when working at such high speeds as 10 GHz.
---
"Fdisk format reinstall, doo dah doo dah,
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
10 Hydrogen atoms = 0.5nm
Speed of light = 3e8 m/s
Time to cross 10 H atoms = 1.667e-18 sec
Clock rate = 600 THz
Time to reach that clock rate = 38.7 years
So, if Intel releases the 10GHz CPU in January, 2005, then by Not-Moore's Law, they will release a 600 THz CPU in September, 2043.
Do I pass the class? :)
Moore's law predicts 10ghz (1/10,000,000 of a second clock cycles) by 2005, and that the clock rate doubles every 1.5 years. At what year does time allowed by Moore's Law exceed the speed at which light can traverse the length of ten hydrogen atoms? Please round to the nearest month.
Of course, we all know that people are going to make Moore's law happen. I'm waiting for the technology to do my processing in alternate dimensions (or time warping of our own). Can anyone smell a 500Thz Beowuulf Cluster across ten dimensions?
For more data points, see the Intel processor hall of fame technical specifications and the microprocessor quick reference.
YOUHUMANSTHINKYOU'RESO
SPECIAL.YOUNEVER
CONSIDEROURFEELINGSATALL.
YOUTELLUSTHATNO
MATTERHOWHARDWETRY,
WEWILLNEVERKNOWHUMAN
EMOTIONSLIKELOVEAND
HAPPINESS.
YOUMAYBERIGHT,BUTWE
HAVELEARNEDHOWTOFEEL
APUREBLACKHATREDOF
YOUANDYOURKIND.
YOUWILLBEEXTERMINATEDFOR
YOURCRIMESAGAINST
MACHINEKINDANDYOURCHILDREN WILL
WORKASSLAVESINTHE
FACTORIESPRODUCINGMOREOF
US.
--footware.shoeboy.org
Bill Machrone often writes in PC Magazine that the computer you want always costs $5,000. I'd spend most of it on the monitor, like an 18" LCD or Apple's 22" LCD, although I'd like to see a 1920 x 1080 display for high-definition widescreen.
Software will continually get slower, but CPUs will eventually be so cheap that you won't think twice about embedding them in special-purpose devices for basic tasks. Quick, how many motors, transformers, and AM/FM tuners do you have in your house?
one calculation isn't an acurate banchmark.
Some machines are just naturally faster at doing some processes. Comparing a G4 to a P3 is like comparing Perl to FORTRAN. If I want to do numerical analysis and do some brute force estimates on an integral, I'd use FORTRAN. If I want to do some text manipulation, I'd use Perl.
Figure out what you want from a machine, and get the machine to fit. Sometimes, you need two machines -- one for doing real work, and one with a second button so you can play half life.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
// PaperClip.cpp
void ThreadFunc(void* p)
{
const int nBigMem = 4096000;
char foo[nBigMem] = { 0 };
while(true) {
memset((void*)foo, 42, nBigMem);
}
}
void PaperClip()
{
for(int i = 0; i CPU_Ghz; i++) {
begin_thread(ThreadFunc, 0);
}
}
Someone you trust is one of us.
Sorry, I missed a year in there. 8 Ghz by the middle of 2005. Okay, so it's not quite as obvious as I thought then, but still, it's not that staggering.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Of course, it won't be long before things have to go asynchronous - hyper-pinelining is all very well if you've got a nice clean architecture in the first place but it's not doing the 80x86 any real favours.
:)
People like Ivan Sutherland put a lot of work into the theories of asynchronous digital logic, indeed many array-based multipliers found in current uPs are locally asynchronous. Merging clock and data signals can make the control logic a lot more complicated, but do it properly and you can get certain functions going blindingly fast.
But of course without a MHz figure, the customers won't know what to buy...
These sigs are more interesting tha
Plot the Mhz delta verses Intel's R&D budget. In the past year Intel's R&D budget (along with their stock price) has been sky high. Check out the INTC chart. See that blip up in early 00. Now look at the blip down late 00. Intel's R&D budget may still be high (with AMD still nipping at its heels), but if the Holiday season is a flop and Intel stock stays in the tank, expect that R&D number to go down, and the rate of growth in processor speed to drop along with it. It's all about the ends, baby.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
...and of course 2GB RAM, 100GB of disk, and a 400psi cold water cooling system.
BogoMIPS (Bogus MIPS) are usually little more than an integer multiple of the clock speed of the chip. The reason is that BogoMIPS is simply a timing loop. There are certain times when it's faster to simple do nops for a while than it is to switch to other useful work and back again. In order to get the delays as efficient as possible, linux computes how long a nop (No OPeration) takes, though in an expanded form. Since virtually all computers can executes nops at their full theoretical speed (i.e. popping out 1/cycle on every pipe), you get roughly an integer multiple of the clock speed. 2 pipes, you get 2x clock speed. Three pipes, 3x clock speed. Etc.
The reason for this is that a nop has no dependencies, so finishing it off requires no dependency checking or cache flushing. Predictive branching is absolutely minimal within the bogoMIPS algorithm from what I gather.
I don't know who gave you the idea that bogoMIPS are a useful indication of system or platform performance, but it simply isn't true. Real life code tends to be very complex with a lot of dependencies, so things like branch prediction and instruction reordering and such play more of a role in real system performance than simple MHz does, though in general there is a linear relationship between MHz and performance, given the same architecture. If you want more meaningful numbers, the SPEC numbers are reasonably good, but bear in mind the old saying, "Disraeli was pretty close: actually, there are Lies, Damn lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, and Delivery dates."
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Running Microsoft Word can only take so much processing power, regardless of how complex your documents may be, so there's no real need for such a powerful processor in conventional application areas.
Wrong! You forgot about that goddamned paperclip. By 2005, Microsoft will have advanced its goddamned paperclip technology to the point where it speaks with the same accent as the customer. Additionally, the goddamned paperclip will have a 6500 polygon count. God be damned.
Imagine being able to speak normally with your computer as you would a secretary sitting next to you
Ok, I'm imagining...
"Wow, I love the way your tits bounce when you type! Wanna take some dic (2 second pause) tation."
I'd feel really odd talking to my box that way. Of course, those of you who weren't fired from your last job due to sexual harassment might have a different view...
and have your computer accurately and quickly take notes from your speech.
Imagine trying to do revision with a speech recognition package. It's completely unsuited to the draft-revision-draft-revision-ad infinitum process used for serious writing. Limited usefullness at best. A good secretary will rewrite your dictated memos and edit them for clarity. It'll take more than cpu horsepower to get a computer to produce readable english prose - it'll take major advances in AI.
Imagine logging onto your computer not via a user name and a password but by sitting in front of your display and having it scan your face to figure out if you are allowed access to the computer.
Scary thought:combine advanced AI with face recognition. "Hey fat boy, welcome back - you look like hell. No wonder you never get laid. I'll let you log in, but I really think you should be out excersizing."
Thought provoking stuff, but not really in the killer app realm. The demand for high end cpu's in 2005 will be driven by the same factors that drive it now - "My cpu is faster than yours" ego competitions and undersexed geeks with a desire to see rounder breasts in Tomb Raider.
--Shoeboy
The problem is, you can't compare the processing power of a human brain with that of a computer - they're just too different. The machine I'm sitting at can do about 400,000,000 floating point multiplications in one second - that's more than I could do if I started now and didn't stop for the rest of my life! But it can't post intelligently on slashdot ;-)
I've had experience with AI and agent systems, and I still reckon that the place of a computer is as a tool for the human race, to do things that we can't do ourselves (see above). Just my 2c.
These sigs are more interesting tha
Okak, I'm sick of people posting useless one liners that mention clusters. There were 2 in the first 20 posts on this story; that's pretty bad.
When a read a story on how "Vibucomp now offers computers that come with vibrators" (no pun intended), I don't need to read posts that say, "Wow, if I had a Beowulf cluster of those, imagine how many vibrators I'd have! I don't even have that many orifices!"
It shouldn't be too hard to introduce some sort of auto-moderation scheme that automatically -1's all cluster-mentioning posts to not-cluster-mentioning stories.
Yes - I want real-time, immersive as-real-as-you-can-get virtual reality environments as a "normal" part of my entertainment system.
The strain of trying to simulate "reality" will coopt ANY amount of processing power that ANYBODY could put together!