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Transmeta Founder Talks Chips
gManZboy writes "Dave Ditzel, CTO and Founder of Transmeta (you remember Transmeta? weren't they supposed to kick some Intel booty?) sits down and speaks with Alpha and StrongARM chip designer Dan Dobberpuhl about the history of CPUs, where they're heading, and how the heck we'll keep up Moore's Law (if we can)."
(you remember Transmeta? weren't they supposed to kick some Intel booty?)
Uh, 1992 called. They want their slang back (and their processors, while you're at it.)
In an October 1998 article, EE Times named him one of "40 forces that will shape the semiconductor industry of tomorrow."
Hmm. I wonder what day in October 1998 that was supposed to be? I don't remember any big change.
I can't find it again, but I saw an interesting discussion that took the number of processors and embedded processors and the exponential growth of these devices and also the MIPS scaling and the energy per MIPS and compared it to the amount of energy in the sun. It was very clear that at some point you will run out of energy to power all the CPUs in a surprisingly short amount of time.
I wish I could find it again. (please let me know if you know)
I'd like to see the future of computing (and I do mean desktop computing) where the whole system has no moving parts. You read me, no spinning hard drive, only solid-state MRAM drives (or something.) No fans, not even in the power supply. 5W CPUs with the more processing muscle as today's 60W beasts. Oh, and OLED screens.
Well that's enough fantasizing for one day.
DOBBERPUHL The power is dissipated mostly in the transistors, either as they switch or as they just sit there and leak.
You can calculate the dynamic power dissipation with the formula P = CV2f, where V is the power supply, C is the capacitance that is being switched, and f is the switching rate. There are some additional factors, but fundamentally the dynamic power is given by that formula.
I'd like to see ... 5W CPUs with the more processing muscle as today's 60W beasts
It would be a fine thing, but there's no sign of it happening. Instead, the next desktop CPUs are due to dissipate more like 103 watts. It's sad.
Flash media, and not MRAM, thank you very much. As for fans, well, just look at some Mini-ITX boxes. And ask for something that can take a 1GHz ULV Pentium M, which outputs ~7W, and is as powerful as a 2GHz Pentium 4, which outputs ~60W. About your OLED screen, why not the billboard-grade eInk that can pull 70FPS (for your Intel Extreme Graphics 2 that can only pull 50 on a good day)?
The hard drive ... can ... be [replaced by] a ... flash disk [holding] 8 [GB}.
(1) You need more like 80-200GB to replace hard disk these days.
(2) Flash is appallingly slow writing and does not seem to be getting much faster anytime soon.
The hard disk is a moving target, and flash is not catching up.
Not that you did read the article, but here's a great paper (pdf) on low-power processor design with lots of graphs and equations showing where the architecture can tradeoff power to keep your silicon chips from melting.
The paper is out of Stanford paid for by your tax dollars.. Hopefully you won't notice the part about the address at Stanford University being the William Gates Computer Science Bldg
Isn't transmeta's new, super-kewl uberchip running at a wonder 1.1 ghz? Or was it 1.4?
How Moore's Law affects some computer users as measured in the time it takes to do something, like render a page of a document on the graphical screen in a window opened for a word processor, is shown as an example here:
- 1992 1.25 seconds
- 1993 800 milliseconds
- 1994 500 milliseconds
- 1995 320 milliseconds
- 1996 200 milliseconds
- 1997 125 milliseconds
- 1998 80 milliseconds
- 1999 50 milliseconds
- 2000 32 milliseconds
- 2001 20 milliseconds
- 2002 12500 microseconds
- 2003 8000 microseconds
- 2004 5000 microseconds
- 2005 3200 microseconds
- 2006 2000 microseconds
- 2007 1250 microseconds
- 2008 800 microseconds
- 2009 500 microseconds
- 2010 320 microseconds
- 2011 200 microseconds
- 2012 125 microseconds
When you are doing something interactively and have to wait the better part of a second (or worse) for each step to complete, it can be a big pain. A faster CPU would be nice. But once that wait gets down into a certain range (varys depending on what the task actually is), it won't really matter as much, if at all.There will still be needed even faster CPUs for many things. The use of cryptography will certainly be increasing and that is a big need for more CPU speed. Larger, more bloated (in terms of steps of code, in addition to RAM and disk space), operating systems and applications will need faster (and larger) CPUs, too (though many have learned to avoid these steps to avoid the costs of upgrades to software and hardware).
But the market for faster CPUs will gradually be leaving behind more and more people who do the kinds of things that just don't need it. The threshhold has been reached for many, and soon will be for many more. Hopefully new and expanded uses will keep (or restore) the markets in a thriving condition.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
They spend several paragraphs discussing NMOS capicitors in CMOS processes circa 1994, but apparently neither knew enough to speculate about MIM or Trench capacitor structures, two mature technologies used in DRAM. Yes, they were leading in to the gate leakage issue, but the substance of that boiled down to, "Leakage sure is a big problem." Their solution is low-voltage chips with fewer transistors. Revolutionary!
There's way more substance in press releases from Intel.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Moore's Law is probably a limited phenomenon.
<pedantic>
Probably? Assuredly, I would say. If transistor count continues to double every 2 years, with 42M transistors per CPU in 2000, you would have 43 billion in 2010, 44 trillion in 2020, 47*10^21 in 2050, and 53*10^36 in 2100. If that hasn't reached the number of atoms in the known universe, then keep counting years and it will.
</pedantic>
One of the best Transmeta features was supposed to be the replaceable "translator layer" code, so it could run as ix86, motorola, alpha, or whatever CPU you wanted. (so you could boot Amiga, Mac and PC stuff on the same box, just picking upload of proper code on bootup. But AFAIK only x86 translator code was ever created. Anybody knows about progress with other platforms?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
are you guys saying that a CPU only uses as much power as a regular lamp [bulb]
Absolutely. But grab a 60-100W light bulb that's been on a few minutes (PLEASE DON'T REALLY!) and tell me what it feels like. That is one heck of a lot of wasted heat energy.
BTW, the body heat of one human is also approximately the same as this figure, and look how much food (energy) we use up each day. It's just spread over a lot of surface area so the peak temperature isn't as high.
I think you meant Amdahl's Law.. the improvement to the user is only as noticeable as the original experience was poor.
The faster the original redraw, the less of an effect the speedier redraws have on the user's interaction experience.
I've been looking for a 100% solid-state DVR.
Why? On-board camera for my race car.
If I can get it to turn on recording at the same time as I push the DATA RECORD switch on the datalogger, then I get video and sound synched to the data log - and that would be a HUGE advantage.
Why solid-state? Because race cars take a lot of abuse. 1.6G to -1.6G in the space of half a second or so.
I figure an MPEG2 capture card, an audio capture card, the OS on EPROM and Compact Flash as the filesystem. Video IN and stereo audio IN. Record at full-speed every time the RECORD pin goes to ground. Operate at 10V-16V.
I've found a number of VERY similar devices (for security cameras), but nothing yet that does full speed video and sound. Build one, price it cheap, and I'll buy it.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
New fab construction is often driven by factors unrelated to process. Increased wafer starts, materials handling for 300mm instead of 200mm wafers, bigger/smaller floorplan, different cleanroom specs, etc.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts