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10GHz Processors And Moore's Law
AntiFreeze writes "There is an interesting story on MSNBC about Intel's attempts at producing chips capable of running at faster than 10 gigahertz. There was a previous /. article in early December about this here. This article from MSNBC is much more detailed (both technically and non) than the original article referenced from December, and provides a very intriguing look at what Intel's planning to do over the next four years, and what they'll have to show the general public as soon as April 1st. And as always, there's the heated /. argument about Moore's law buried in there, too."
The halting problem is an NP-Complete problem. Since there is still no proof that P!=NP, there is no proof that the halting problem is impossible.
I read slashdot for the articles.
We all seem to find new CPU's "kickass", since they can do decoding/encoding faster, will enable faster generated images, etc. etc.
But as once was stated at the first lecture I saw about Moore's Law: If we don't have the technology (or software) to "use" this new hardware, what good is it? The gap between software and hardware is getting larger every day.
Just a small sidenote: apart from me running seti@home and some rendering stuff, my pII-celeron 266 is mostly having a load of 0.02.
This is a replacement signature.
are impossible in theory but really make no difference to the practical problem. You can solve the halting problem for every problem except that one special case which proves the halting problem unsolvable for every case. Woop! The "proof" that the halting problem is not solvable has done more to damage research into software verifiability than any suggestings that it might be a hard problem. How sane is that? Oh, we cant solve it for every case (because you can manufacture a case that is not solvable) so why bother trying to solve it for any cases, including the large majority of cases?
Sad.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Moore's rule (or whatever) must hold in every case, without exception, until the end of time, no questions asked, to be considered as a conventional law.
Now, if it was called "Moore's Law of Transistor Growth from 1965 to 2000" where transistor count would double every 18 to 20 months, then this would be a law for that specific time period (given if it really held in that entire time frame).
Well, they travel through your body all the time, 24 hours a day. Are you going to shut down every radio transmitter in the world, or just live in a faraday cage?
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
[rant]
Haven't you learned ANYTHING from history? Apparently you were too busy studying physics to pay attention. Here's a tip - never, ever, ever tell a scientist that something's impossible, unless you want to be proven wrong...
[/rant]
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
That would be 1.572864 PHz (Peta-Hertz)
1 in 200 Billion is a very low bit error rate. i hope you heard about error correction schemes and how amazingly well they work even at much higher bit error rates. 100 GHz is a more serious target, but 10 GHz is a joke even for a general purpose microprocessor. there are DSP chips running today at 5 GHz clocks, and some analog parts clocking at 15+ gigs, no sweat (in 0.18 CMOS). for example, read the ISSCC 2001 advance abstracts. basically, you are a troll talking out of your ass.
Yes indeed, 640K is enough for everybody.
Will code a sig generator for food
You were probably using a K6, which in the P2 era was comparable to the P2 Celerons.
So, what's Intel planning? Trying to put the wind up AMD by announcing the 10GHz Itanium on April 1st 2001 and hoping they don't realise what day it is? I don't think that they are that desparate just yet...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Not only would a careful journalist make that distinction, but a careful professor of philosophy teaching the philosophy of technology would also point out the context. That being: Moore was listing a requirement of Intel staying on top of the processor heap. Fall under the 18-24 month doubling, and someone will most likely beat intel in the market. Which greatly alters Moore's Law's meaning; not a pace of technology, but a metric for corporate health.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
And how does your poorly spelled and ungrammatical post help me believe you?
I don't know about you, but I held a memorial minute when my PC's RAM first exceeded the RAM of 1000 C64s. The "my PC is faster than 1000 C64s (only counting the clock speed)" moment hasn't come yet, because my currend machine has been fast enough for all my needs for nearly two years now - and will probably still continue to do so for at least another 18 months...
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Cthulhu fhtagn!
"Well, the P4 has bugs in it. wanna bet that the P10 @ 10 Ghz will have bugs too? :o)
As more and more people turn to AMD, Intel is trying everything they can to turn the tide. Thruth is, the inventors of the cpu are getting there ass kicked by AMD, and they can't stop em..."
What support you got? You made 4 unsupported statements, and you even made some more unsupported statements based on the unsupported statements. Please, elabortate =)
Give me a break, I have not slept in 30+ hours.
GiraffeSville, a place anyone can call home
Thanks:) BTW, is that a feasible frequency? Could computers rip a hole in the fabric of space & time as we know it??
[H]ard|OCP for some reason comes to mind...
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -Gilmore
Ridiculous... in fact the Cray-1 worked at about 70MHz back in 1977 using ECL logic.
:-)
The evolution has been done mostly in the consumer department (CMOS), not in the bleading edge technology (Bi, ECL and GaAs).
You could have 50GHz CPUs right now if the demand existed. But it does not. Supercomputers are not that "super" nowadays
But the speed will not improve in the future by means of raw clock speed: the improved architecture will make the difference.
In fact that is already happening a bit.
You cannot proceed from the informal to formal by formal means
...can a transistor be reliable with only three atoms in width?? Think of one of them vaporizes due to heat or something...then the whole chip will be useless.
Getting the world hooked on computers and your chips = $billions
Making billions around the world depend on computers and computer chips only to tell them that they cannot advance it any further on April fools day 2001...priceless....
The article says that without EUV the end of Moore's law would be around 2005, so how much time has EUV bought?
How we know is more important than what we know.
As tim the tool man would say "More power!!" and then grunt a few times. More power is always good! hool www.lucid-empires.com
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
GALLIUM-ARSENIDE FET AMPLIFIERS have been developed which provide low-noise amplification up to about 30 dB in the 7- to 18-gigahertz range. The power output of many of these amplifiers is relatively low, approximately 20 to 200 milliwatts, but that is satisfactory for many microwave applications. Research has extended both the frequency range and the power output of gallium-arsenide FET amplifiers to frequencies as high as 26.5 gigahertz and power levels in excess of 1 watt in multistage amplifiers.
The web page with this info is located at http://www.tpub.com/neets/book11/45o.htm. There is nothing preventing this being used for computing. Advances need to be made to provide syncronised clock signals to all the chip and the power consumption will need to be dealt with. These are analog devices at this time.
The truth shall set you free!
And as always, there's the heated /. argument about Moore's law buried in there too
What heated argument? They're just saying this is a way to keep it going...
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It seems like bleeding-edge technology like that might never make it into our living-rooms. I really think 10 ghz is full possible, but I truely hate the person that could afford that kind of technology. Not to mention cooling. Sometimes I think those technicians and scientists make that sort of thing for their own use. I can only imagine the Intel people in their bunny suits playing Half-Life on machines that break down after the half-life of their processors has past and the CPU decays.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
Mosix does this I believe... clustering can work really well if you have an abundance of independant processes... like a multiuser system, where the user doesn't really know where their processes are actually being executed.
My point was that the typical processes running on a desktop machine are unsuitable for this type of farming out to a cluster.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
Dunno 'bout u ppl, but I'm sure gonna throw meself a lil' party! :)
Geez.. Seems like a lifetime since my trusty 'ol 8088 was a "screamer"...
"Sex is like software, it's better when it's free" - Linus Thorvalds Remove everything between the pipe's to email me
The problem is that it is called a law, which it isn't. But as long as everybody refers to it as one, people will take it as a law, much like Newton's.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
It's not even a theory. A theory is a conjecture who's intent is to explain some measured data. Moore's Law is only an observation based on measured data.
Consider Time Kill's law, circa 1999: Nasdaq doubles every 3 years. It's a statement based on some observations at some point in time. There's data to support it but no explanation to support it. It also seems pretty invalid right now.
Second thought, not sure it was a Celeron. Whatever it was I was sorry I couldn't get better. =)
Couldn't you sidestep this problem with a solution you hinted at the end of your post? That is, parellel processing? If your statement is actually true, that 1 in every 250 Billion bits will be corrupted, couldn't you just run the same process on two processors at the same time and compare them? If the two results aren't the same, do it over again. But for the 1 in 250 Billion bits to line up with the other 1 in 250 Billion bits would be so astronomically unlikely that you may solve the problem right there. and if not, stick a second redundant processor in, and so on.
I think you see the solution to your own problem, so don't go saying it's impossible.
Smokin' speeds, no wait, and maybe sub-fission temperatures.. Wow!
So what will we use this for? Rendering the highest-quality ever cartoon pr0n and doctoring Natalie Portman pics faster than our neighbor?
Note how the original poster wrote
"due to different wire lengths"
At 10ghz, each stage of (say) a 5 stage pipline will take ~2 nanoseconds. Electricity can travel ~1 foot per nanosecond. So therefore, if the data required in (say) a cache fetch instruction stage was more than 1 foot away, or if the cache took a non-zero amount of time to look it up (which it will indeed) then you're going to have you a nice little pipeline stall.
Anyway, I think Intel has a bigger than 5 stage pipeline, which just reduces the distance we can "travel" during each stage.
Consider thyself corrected.
IMHO, once Intel drops Rambus like the hot turd that they are, many people will see the light and become loyal again. Between the AMD|OC obsession, VIA's spotty chipset drivers that create new bugs while fixing old ones, and 54% L337 H4X0R contingent of the entire AMD customer base, AMD's crusin' for a bruisin' from Chipzilla.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Take a working chip of anykind. Try something new like copper, silver, aluminum gold aloy, different transistor doping, interconnect size,. Get new equipment to process it. Discover copper, silver migrates into silicon and kills transistors. Try a few things to stop copper migration. Each experiment takes time and money to set up and the results are not known for a couple months because you have to make the IC to test it. When you are done 2 years later you have a 25% faster part. Now repeat with the next speed enhancement. It is not a conspiracy, it is the developement cycle. Rushing it means changing multiple things at the same time like changing lines, insutlaters, transistor size, doping, voltage, etc. all at once then not understanding why it doesn't work. Any single change usualy makes a device not work on the first try. The result needs examined and changes made to make it work right. Improvements are done from something working to somethnig unknown and making it work, then going on to the next change.
The truth shall set you free!
Let's miss x-rays and make gamma rays the next milestone.
Personally, I wish they'd build a chip with 1024 Z80 processors and 64K RAM each. Something along those lines. I wonder how many 8-bit processors could fit into the space of the Pentium chip. ...off to lookup transistor counts.
Even then you run into inherent problems with distributed programs - latency and high cost of sync everything. Imagine running a 1000000 8088. Does this make this computer super fast? No, you have a system that might run a *distributed* program much faster than a typical computer but not much more for regular programs. Think about a typical distributed databases and wonder why there aren't too many of them. A truly replicated serializable database scales n^5 in the number of nodes! That's why there isn't too many massively replicated databases.
Distributed stuff is great (heck, my primary research is on distributed wireless crap) but I think there is too much hype and many people really don't understand the costs associated with it. Clusters are useful for *very* small number of situations.
Isn't FPGA un-godly expensive to manufacture and slow as a sea cow?
I guess what you are proposing is to go to CISC instead of the current direction of RISC processors. Well, I'm sure there has been many discussions about merits of CISC and RISC proc but both has its advantages and disadvantages.
But I agree what is the purpose of a faster general purpose CPU? Do I really need a faster computer to do Word? Speech recognition and stuff may be cool but I really don't see any killer apps that will make me upgrade my computer (even games don't seem to stretch the capability of the computers as much as they used to)
I suppose you can think of it like CISC. I've never really thought of it that way - I'm sure the nVida GeForce has an instruction set. I think of it more like the SGI / Amiga way of doing things. You have a very basic general purpose CPU, and then have optimized hardware to perform all the regular and other-wise complex tasks. I mentioned OS simply because they're among the most common operations a program does (even though it may not necessarily be that complex).
As for the question about making word run faster.. This entire discussion assumes an underlying desire to ever increase the speed of processing; and specifically the potential limits of More's law - namely continuing human ingenuity.
Note, there are all sorts of problems with hardware based operation, but so long as we have API's like OpenGL, POSIX, MFC, etc, then we don't have to worry about the specifics of how it's implemented. Is the latest kernel hardware accelerated? Who cares from a developer's point of view.
-Michael
I don't see how we're "handing" anything over.. Has OpenGL been conquored by nVida or 3Dfx? So long as you have an open API, the specifics of how someone implements it doesn't fundamentally affect you. Yes, MS might put feature bloat that we become depend on exclusively their products; but they'll just open themselves up for further anti-trust litigation.
Further, I really only see ASIC's as stepping stones towards development. Isn't the GeForce a full blown processor? This is most likely because of the large volumes..
Rapid switching FPGA could very well be revolutionary, since you'd have one or two pieces of hardware that are reprogrammed for their environment on the fly. But that's vapor-wear at this point. FPGA is (to my understanding) primarily for proof-of concept, or getting something out the door.
-Michael
-Michael
You are correct in that Newton's Laws are really proven false (by those expensive experiments in the late 1800s and early 1900s), but there's a difference here. Newton's Laws were dogma for so long (200 years or so) and are still such good approximations that no one ever got around to demoting them as "laws". As long as your inertial frames are almost identical (which is the case in simple mechanics), Newton's formulas do just fine. Given that your frames are "very close", Newton's Laws will always give you a good approximation, which is why they're still considered laws, I guess.
Contrary, Moore's Law isn't even an established law: it's just something the co-founder of Intel said while trying to pitch his IPO. I don't have the data, so I'm not even sure how accurate the rule is. As it stands, the rule is kind of like saying, "You should only need four or five gallons of gas to make a 100 mile trip."
omg! why not make a network cable in the form factor of a DIMM? holy fukc!? the thinkg of it is, the network would just be as fast as ram, and as long as you put a decent size cache in there, say 16Mb@clock you could tune the kernel to cooperatively manage memory across the nodes. you could then order up mobo's with multiplexed chipsets and 16 DIMM Slots, no ports, no busses. you could then connect each processor in the cloud by 16 dimensions. at >10k nodes, this system would be sufficient (with an assumption of each processor doing about 2gflops with a combined 256Mb state cache) to process a perfect copy model of the human mind, in realtime.
thankyou.
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
But that won't stop the chip manufacturers from trying of course.
January 15, 2028 - Intel announces their new 400THz processor, which performs 100 billion floating-point operations in the millisecond before it consumes itself in a nuclear explosion. This is a step up from AMD's recent processor which simply fries any nearby user with bolts of plasma energy. Hobbyists are already looking into ways to overclock the chip.
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Actually, that 'law' is its own explanation. If people believe that Nasdaq doubles every three years, they'll tend to act on that belief and (if a large enough number of people get involved) it becomes self-fulfilling.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
While everything is obviously shielded, it is still amusing to speculate on the cooking potentials of the insides of your PC.
What is more worrisome is the problem of heat. I recall reading someplace that right now a typical processor runs the energy of a 60 watt light bulb through that piece of ceramic.
When we multiply this with the frequency shifts and the number of transistors, it becomes worrisome.
I occasionally have visions of computers glowing like a flying saucer [smile]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've never heard of anyone who thinks Moore's law is an actual law of physics. That would be just stupid.
Of course, I don't live in America, where everything is possible.
Better off with multiple slower CPUs, like 1.5 GHz and Beowulf them. More machines to take care of, but better than rushed/poor fabbing of CPUs. Plus you get redundancy and almost unlimited scalability. And ungodly bandwidth if you use gigabit cards instead of just 100bt. It's the way to go for pretty much everything unless you have something custom for one cpu (which is rare these days)
...and then after a few years the capitalization of the stock market exceeds the total wealth of the world. So, a large enough number of people would have to believe that it is possible. You must believe that (in the future) even though by selling your shares you could buy everything in the world, there will still be suckers who are going to pay you that much. It does not work like that my fried.
The halting problem is an NP-Complete problem. Since there is still no proof that P!=NP, there is no proof that the halting problem is impossible.
Umm, no. The halting problem has to do with decidability, not computation time. Decidability only requires that we get an answer in finite time and P and NP are both finite, so the question of P?=NP is irrelevant. This means that some computational problems *are* impossible, which, however has very little to do with the topic at hand.
In the world of mathematics it's easy to show that many things are impossible. In the world of engineering, it's generally pretty hard to determine what is possible except within narrow constraints. This doesn't mean that nothing is impossible, it just means that we're not good at predicting what is impossible; some things that appear hard are easy and some things that appear easy are hard.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Is the lifetime mentioned the physical lifetime of the CPU, or the economical? Seems a bit expensive for something that only comes with 2 months warranty ... :)
Actually, I think a 10 year stall in Moore's law could be good for the industry as a whole.
The vast majority of software is very inefficiently written, making poor use of the processors we have. Given a 10 year lull in processor speed hikes we would be forced to explore the potential of what we have and squeeze out every last drop of performance we could find.
It would be extremely painful but leave us (as an industry) in better shape to exploit future breakthroughs in processor speed.
It does. The previous poster just didn't cover enough data points to demonstrate it ... 128bit = 1 month, 129bit = 2 month, 130bit = 4 month .... you know the powers of 2, don't you? :)
Well, it was just on the x86 architecture (times are 286). The tricks used were:
:] I'm sorry, but I can't really remember how he made it even faster, it was something about POP'ing the function arguments faster.
-- mov'ing and setting registers as many cycles apart as possible
-- making a table of MUL's of 320 (getting the stuff from mem goes faster than MUL'ing it real time)
-- completely ASM (of course)
-- some other horror stuff (can't really remember, it was years ago).
So I posted this to a certain newsgroup about gaming in response to somebody asking for it. Blatently noting that this should be the fastest way around. It was not
Sidenote: it had to run on a 286 (so no fancy wide EAX registers available) and it had to be a function.
This is a replacement signature.
Yes, you do believe that others are irrational, and that's because they often are. That's how bubbles in the {stock,tulip,etc} market get started and grow.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
At 1 Ghz, the speed of light in a vacuum moves 11.3 inches every clock cycle. To get to 10 Ghz, light can only move 1.13 inches. The diameter of these chips right now is something like 0.5 inches. So, I'll be really surprised if we get to 10 Ghz.
Right now, there is another way to do this: Take the signal S from a real noisy amplifier, and feed it (for instance) to a comparator that gives you a 1 for S>0 and a zero for S0. Take a number of bits from the comparator#s output, line them up into an integer value (for instance) and you've got a true random number
C - the footgun of programming languages
Would you have felt better if they said "at the start of the second quarter"?
How we know is more important than what we know.
I have more of a question I guess, How many bits do our current crypto systems need to be safe when running a 10Ghz chip? Especialy on a cluster of 10Ghz PC's.
Patrick C. Lamoreux lamoreux@iastate.edu
heard of reversible computing? We havn't even scratched the surface of power/heat reduction.
How we know is more important than what we know.
compared to the zillion dollar price of one of these (not to mention software optimised for these/ new motherboard etc) i might as well chuck the fan....
invest in airconditioner stocks ONLY
also im throwing away my laptop battery and sticking to the wall socket...
shooting is not too good for my enemies
What's funny is when I got my 800MHz Athlon, I committed myself to keeping the case cover on all the time for fear of rads. :-) One of my friends and I discussed this, but neither of us know much about atomic physics.
Will processors running at that speed require shielding?
Yeah, right! The future is DNA computing? It's a hack that happens work for some obscure computationally intensive problems that can easily be paralellized. You do not want a DNA computer to replace your desktop, trust me on this. It would take hours just to set up a simple computation. It could make for an interesting co-processor, though, but for mainstream use the gains are probably not worth it. Parellell computing? Maybe, but there are lot's of interesting problems that are not easily paralellized. Anyway, you forgot to mention quantum computing. That is definitely interesting, if it will ever work (and chances are it will not). But for the close future, I'll be willing to bet a lot that Moore's law will probably still be valid for a few more years.
May I suggest you go look over your computability and complexity class notes again?
The halting problem has to do with computability -- what problems can be solved by a computer. It is a simple example of a problem that can never be completely solved for all inputs, no matter how long the computer works on it.
NP-complete describes a class of problems which can be solved, but seem to take a long time to do so. It is not known whether these problems can be solved quickly, but many man years of effort has been spent trying to find a fast solution.
So the halting probem is not NP-complete, simply because it can not be solved at all.
One thing that hasn't been discussed is that although a limit may be reached, for the clock speed of a chip, companies can always design better chips. Maybe one day, AMD and Intel won't be racing for the fastest chip in GHZ, but for the best designed processor. (Much like a 800 Duron is better designed than a 800 Celeron)
*grins* now there is a chip I"d like to see.. too bad they couldn't imbed tux on it too.. but that's just a linux dream *sighs* :))
.sig under construction
It can work like that in the short term. Of course nobody believes that Nasdaq can keep doubling indefinitely; all that's required is they think the 'law' will hold over the next few years. But I don't think anyone is likely to believe that nowadays.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'm curious.... could a processor be built with part of it using that "feature" of quantum mechanics to deliberately corrupt data?
there are a lot of algorithms out there that rely on intensive calls to pseudo-random number generators (genetic algorithms come to mind) which would greately benefit from this!..
When you say Ohm's Law, don't you mean "Ohm's statement the physicists have deigned to grant legal status too, but will be mighty pissed if you try and pass your own observations off with the same grandeur"
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
2D scaling is a problem, when you start pushing theoretical limits. However, many of our speed increases are due to better designs as well as better techniques. I've seen some promising theoretical work in expanding into the third dimension, which may cause cooling problems but may also allow better designs.
I also imagine, due to cooling requirements, development may go the route of multiple cheaper processors rather than expensive Apollo project processors (processors that push the theoretical limits). When this happens, software will start to morph to take advantage of it, and I predict we will still see gains comparable to Moore's law.
a few years ago I remember reading that when they got too small, they could replace the silicon with galium arsinide (GaAs), and gain major performance increases. Anyone know anything about that?
ideal; model tiny; codeseg; org 100h; start: cli; hlt; ret; ENDS; END start
No one will ever need more than 640 MHz!
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
We'll all be eagerly awaiting the news... and all we'll get is a crummy Terrance and Phillip Fart-Chip 2000 or something.
Karma: NaN
Oh, but Murphy's law has been experimentally tested by many people many times. It is most definitely a law of physics :-)
Better off with multiple slower CPUs, like 1.5 GHz and Beowulf them. More machines to take care of, but better than rushed/poor fabbing of CPUs. Plus you get redundancy and almost unlimited scalability. And ungodly bandwidth if you use gigabit cards instead of just 100bt. It's the way to go for pretty much everything unless you have something custom for one cpu (which is rare these days)
Actually if you are going to have a system of highly interconnected cpu's like in a beowulf cluster then you are limited fairly severly in scalability. This is mostly due to the size of the memory bus. Even if you move up to gigabit ethernet cards the bus is a big limiting factor.
Secondly the class of tasks that a cluster is useful for is not that big. It does nothing towards making a really bloated program run any faster. They are not very good for real time tasks because once you have chopped up a problem and distributed it to all of the processors you have very little time to work on it and get the results back in time.
While very useful the cluster is not likely to be the solution to potential end of Moore's law like growth.
When I want your opinion I will beat it out of you.
I think that they were arguably right. Moore's law is the statement that "the number of transisters a chip can hold will double every 18 to 24 months". Moore speculated that his law would hold in the future. I.e. the law is a statement, and in formulating it Moore was speculating that it is true.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
No it can't work, unless you believe that others are irrational. If you believe that it is going to stop at some point, you will never buy the asset just before that so it must stop before whenever you believed it is going to stop. By backward induction, it will never start to rise like that.
Then why does almost every single linux company I know of (regardless of their field) have *at least* a 6-node beowulf cluster. It's not for SETI, my friend. Some folks need that power without having to get a crazy expensive Sun/HP/SGI/DEC/Aviion or with some performance-crippled 8-way xeon. If you BREAK UP the task, it works better. Gigabit is more than enough for databases, etc.
No. To begin, I do not know what assumptions you used to arrive at those numbers. I cannot argue them until I know these things. However, I can give a counterexample to your claim: the single electron transistor.
You should go to the library and do some research on the single electron transistor. Go to a university library and look in some professional journals (Physical Review B is usually where things like that get published) because it is not a topic that appears in the popular press.
So? Like everything else, the hardware in professionally available video editting systems (Read: Avid, Media 100's, et al) is generally a few years ahead of what's available in the consumer market. Likewise the sound boards used by audio edittors is a few years ahead of what's available to consumers (read Soundblasters). The list goes on and on. The consumer market is driven by commodities. The professional markets make use of different technologies before they become commoditized. Why should it even be shocking that the NSA operates in the same manner?
Ok, so what happens when we hit a practical mile-stone? Will faster general purpose CPU's achieve such a limit that it costs 10 times as much to achieve 10% performance gain?
Here are the alternatives. Get away from pipelining (which is a hack that facilitates ever-increasing clock-speeds).. Return to optimized and specialized adders / multiplers, etc. Now that we make things in parallel with 2 - 4 adders, simply produce CPU's with 24 adders, each with no inter-vening pipeline buffers.. The number of transistors significantly goes down for each adder, and through the use high conductive materials (such as diamond) you can achieve large surface area chips. (This assumes that you take on the reverse of existing P4's.. You have the control log and memory interfaces running at 10GHZ while your adder runs at say 100MHZ, which each gate switching with nearly 1/20GHZ probagation delay)
Step two is even more obvious. Specialized hardware.. In the video world, we have only to compare software OpenGL to hardware OpenGL. specialized hardware is monumental because it's the ultimate parallel algorithm. Those algorithms such as MFC, or possibly even OS calls could be hardware controlled.. Granted it makes upgrades a lot harder, but don't we find ourselves spending the money on new video cards every year and a half now? How often does someone upgrade winNT? It already costs $150 for the OS upgrade, what's an additional $50 for the PCI / adaptive AGP card?
To facilitate smoother transitions, I think that FPGA or ASICS might have a popularity explosion. As far as I know, they're still manufactured with huge gate-widths.. Bring an ASICs into the "10GHZ" range, and you have the potential for incredible performance.
In fact, the CPU as we know it might fade away into the anals of history over time. A return to cartraiges perhaps?
-Michael
-Michael
Could you please elaborate on the details of that putpixel problem? Sounds like it could possibly be a somewhat interesting story?
They'll have something to show on April 1st? Am I the only one who raised an eyebrow at this bit?
The reason it is impossible is due to heating issues, and also that down at 0.01 microns a single bit is represented by only a few hundred electrons. Quantum Mechanics states that the uncertainty od such a conglomeration is about 1 in 200 Billion - ie, the 'bit' is only certain to that degree. Given that a processor at this soeed will precess many times this amount per second, it is impossible for a processor to run at this architectural scale because one in every 250 Billion bits will be corrupted - which is fatal. I have estimated that the top speed we are likely to see is about 3GHz at 0.05 microns. To assert otherwise is hogwash.
The future lies in parallel processing and DNA, mark my words. You can bet AMD and Intel are reseaching it now. The traditional CPU is nearly dead.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
He's not your fried.
Rhymes with what?
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"We expect to have the first full field-scanned images by April 1," said Chuck Gwyn, program director for EUV. ;)
Wouldn't happen to look like this would it?
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"Almost isn't good enough - but it's almost good enough."
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"Almost isn't good enough - but it's almost good enough."
-Me
Theoretically, it should be possible to slightly increase the width of all data paths and add some error correction information.
:-)
The tricky part is that not only storage and data paths would need ECC - all processing circuitry would need to support error correction with redundant circuits. Even the most basic building blocks would need to be redesigned and replaced with versions that incorporate ECC sanity checking into their internal design to take into account the fact that any intermediate stage may flip a bit. I imagine designing an error correcting adder or multiplier would be a nightmare but it's possible.
The resulting architecture would probably need to be a very simple processor, VLIW perhaps.
And I bet it would emulate a Pentium using Transmeta-style translation
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
That's a laugh. I wonder if the respective representatives have to be seated at opposite corners of the room. Intel hates AMD because AMD tainted the PC world, and AMD hates Intel because, even though the Athlon has great sales, they STILL can't establish a positive reputation.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I don`t think our computers will stop at 3Ghz as one said in a reply to the 10Ghz post. We think now that it is impossible, but what do we think in 2-3 years from now? You tell me! Simen
Check out this truly scheweeeeeeet cluster!
http://tux.anu.edu.au/Projects/Bunyip/Beo-017.jpg
http://tux.anu.edu.au/Projects/Bunyip/Beo-015.jpg
Now *THAT* would be the ultimate quake server or GIMP beast! But... who can afford the electricity?!?!
If you go to an opto system, speed will always be coefficient of medium, ~3,000,000kps. But when you transfer energy, if it isn't converted back into signal, heat is generated too. What would be way kewl(Cool!) is integrated Peltier junctions to help dissipate heat. Built in heal sink!
Another thing is the inductive coupling of longer wires. There's a reason why all those stupid ground returns on a parallel cable! They redirect the induced signal to gnd. Capacitance effectively blunts the wavefront of a signal, but if they work with soliton pulses(essentially a pre squished square wave), they have nothing to blunt/induce. Induction is a rise time effect more than anything else. The trouble with solitons is when is the bloody thing a 0/1???
This mind intentionally left blank.
The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
Power dissipation goes down with reduced size. This makes up for the increase with increased speed.
and also that down at 0.01 microns a single bit is represented by only a few hundred electrons.
Only if they make the transistor that small. .01 micron is the minimum size of a feature, not the size of all features. While smaller transistors are nice, smaller busses are actually more important. Anyway, to take your assumption at face value anyway...
Quantum Mechanics states that the uncertainty od such a conglomeration is about 1 in 200 Billion - ie, the 'bit' is only certain to that degree. Given that a processor at this soeed will precess many times this amount per second, it is impossible for a processor to run at this architectural scale because one in every 250 Billion bits will be corrupted - which is fatal.
Certainly so -- if you don't design any error correction into the chip. It only requires about a 20% increase in real estate to implement two parity bits which would require two simultaneous bit failures to create a nonresolvable error. This would also slow things down very little as parity checking can be done in parallel with computation -- it's always going on. Thus, instead of crashing once every minute or so as your calculations suggest, it would crash once every several hundred billion minutes or so, which is quite tolerable.
I have estimated that the top speed we are likely to see is about 3GHz at 0.05 microns. To assert otherwise is hogwash.
You know a lot about physics, but not much about CPU architecture. Your pet peeve will be relatively simple to work around when the time comes.
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Intel should stop investing so much in CPU speed and move on to more important bottleneck elimination, such as bus speed.
- Amon CMB
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
Although Infiniband is still just getting going, it has great potential for clustering. Adapter's can RDMA to remote hosts directly. Although you could do this with PCI-PCI bridges, PCI was still slow, had limited interconnectivity and latency increased as bridges and busses were added. Infiniband cuts through all that with a network like topology (hubs and switches) but still allows direct memory access.
Of course you still have the problem that current clusters require software be rewritten to take advantage of it. I think someone could design a system that finds other systems across infiniband and shares the work load automatically. The more transparent the clustering, the better.
-- soldack
I've been wondering why processors and memory could have a fiber optic bus and a couple of electrical contacts for power. The processing and memory units would still be silicon or diamond for those of you that like to live on the bleeding edge. However, the disparate components on a mobo would talk to each other optically. I think especially of replacing the address and data buses with fibers. Instead of those thin copper traces running all over a board there would be all these ridges made of glass. Hell, if the manufacturing costs can be dealt with then external cache shouldn't even be needed as ALL of the memory can be run as fast as the CPU core. Just how hard can it be to embed a boatload of optical transcievers into modules and motherboards?
conspiracy time..
isn't it possible that this whole Moore's law thing has been mutated into a method of chip companies extorting as much money as possible from us? I mean, the companies know about Moore's Law, and consequently, they feel that it's perfectly justifiable to release chips in minor increments, while hyping them up as "the next big thing", thus making it possible for people to keep buying and buying and buying...
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense for the chip companies to just do something drastic and instead of moving up in 100 or 200mhz increments, and instead jumping up by gigahertz and nixing the entire 1-10 ghz range? If, all of a sudden, a company released a 10ghz chip, wouldn't they seal their hold on the market for an extremely long time? Even if the chip overheated and had to be underclocked to 50% speed, they'd still be wicked fast.... I'm sure the R&D costs to get from 1ghz to 10ghz in one fell swoop would be enormous, but I'm sure that as long as they could produce them at reasonable cost and sell them at a price that's affordable for anything under the level of Superpower Government, the demand would be so high that they could still turn a profit.
Not to mention the fact that having a 10x speed advantage over the nearest competitors would give them a fairly decent leeway until the rest of the industry caught up.
So, instead of sticking to Moore's law and using it as an excuse to just make more slightly faster chips, why doesn't some company just focus itself completely on developing an Extremely Fast CPU.
somehow i have a horrible feeling this message is somewhat redundant.. oh well... just my $.02k
-ws/dtl
ìì!
A more careful journalist would hopefully have written:
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Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Lowering the voltage has some good effects - the main one is that the power consumption drops as the square of the voltage (assuming Ohms law). However lowering the voltage causes everything to run slower. The old fashioned 4000 series CMOS chips were much faster at 15 volts than they were at 5 volts.
Chips get faster when they shrink because the capacitances decrease as the surface area of a conductor shrinks; cut the feature size by a factor of two in both directions and the capacitance is down by a factor of four. However there is another effect which occurs as everything shrinks; the insulation between features shrinks, and that shrinking feature increases the parasitic capacitance between the two features.
In the past the increase in capacitance caused by the thinning of insulators has not been a significant effect in limiting clock speeds but there comes a point where the effect does become important. In neurons the cell walls are so thin that the capacitance effects of the thin dielectric limit signal propagation speeds in the neuron to about 180 miles per hour or so. Long axons have thick sheaths to cut the capacitance and increase the signal propagation speeds.
This increasing capacitance with the decreasing dielectric thickness combined with the decreasing speed from the lowered voltages will eventually put an effective cap on the clock speed of silicon devices. The only big trick left in the book is too switch to Diamond based semi conductors - which are as much better than silicon than silicon was than germanium - and that will give us some more speed. Above a certain frequency Nature itself changes the way it does things. At RF frequencies bulk devices like crystals function - at the frequencies of light waves only atomic devices can switch from one state to another quickly enough.
In other words at some point in the near future we are going to reach a point where simple die shrinking won't be enough to crank up clock speeds any more. Enjoy things while they last - but another factor of a thousand increase in clock speed (Apple II one megahertz to present day one gigahertz) is going to be very difficult to achieve.
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Am I the only one that thinks they should worry about getting their processors to run correctly at 1GHz before they start tackling 10 GHz? ;)
It actually isn't hard at all to do this. Individual registers can be verified in real time with parity checks. Multiple parity bits can allow parity errors to automatically be resolved without losing data. A clock cycle might have to be skipped while this is done -- once every few hundred billion clocks. Otherwise, it's transparent and consumes rather little chip real estate.
In some cases it would be easier to duplicate entire modules and compare the outputs. It's not necessary to use three blocks with voting; if a compare fails, you redo the operation. It's a computer; until you write the results you still have your starting state to begin from again. So once again, you miss a clock cycle once in a great while.
Remember also that most of the computer is not the CPU and isn't implemented at this level or running at this speed. You only have to harden the parts that are.
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I had a 4 MHz Z80 system by Amstrad from the late 80's whose word processor blew away WordPerfect on a 12 MHz 8086 spell-checking documents. (I'd still be using it but it used proprietary disks and you can't get the drives any more.) This was a very powerful, intuitive word cruncher using an extended text mode that could display 512 different characters at a time on its 90x25 screen, and for ease of use it compared favorably with all but the fastest newest Windows-based systems. It also ran CP/M, and sported an interpreted BASIC that made QBasic look like a sick joke.
If we had software written like that for the x86 platform, it would be amazing what these machines could do. Imagine something text based, with pre-emptive multitasking, installable with only the features you need, highly configurable, with optional graphics, and built by people who really care about what they are doing...
Well, I guess we have an operating system like that, but it would be nice to have applications too.
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And as I pointed out they were wrong.
even if it was running at 10Ghz all the components in the mobo would suffer from heavy timing problems due to different wire lengths.
Cray mainframes of the 80's had this problem as they were refrigerator-sized and operating over 100 MHz; the problem was solved by modularizing the system, desynchronizing the components, and recombining data under controlled circumstances. I remember being told by a beaming engineer in 1982 that some busses had three different addresses on them at the same time.
So it can be done. Now, we'll just see it done 100 times faster with equipment 100 times smaller -- a single chip.
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Personally, for the standard user's desktop I don't see a necessity to speed up the cpus even more. A 1.5GHz CPU, a Gfx card with external power connectors, a 100GB hard drive, is nothing but overkill for someone who writes documents and spreadsheets, communicates via email and surfs the web a little. I myself (even though a CS student and not your standard PC user) see no reason in upgrading my K6-233 and replace it with something that allows me to keep my radiator turned off all winter and requires me to keep a fire extinguisher near, except for the child in me that wants to play with cool stuff...
So the advantage of these technologies is imho that it allows us to produce systems that are only as powerful as the current ones but drastically reduce power consumption and heat emission as well as overall system cost. And since we're pretty much on a way to a mobile market, that is exactly what we need.
Of course, for server technology faster processor speed is quite a lot more interesting... and personally, of course it would be fun to have a 10GHz PC with a 5GHz gfx chip and 2 gigs of RAM as well as a TByte of HD and one awesome 24" flat screen on my desk just for the show :-)
Are we going to have a party when we reach this milestone?
GiraffeSville, a place anyone can call home
As other people have stated before such processor is physically impossible, even if it was running at 10Ghz all the components in the mobo would suffer from heavy timing problems due to different wire lengths. The cost of memory for such a system would be prohibitive (yes, rambus speed would be a joke for such a beast) You would be better off with 10 1Gb processors, even in different motherboards, you would have less memory latency and a lot better price/performance tag.