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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.)
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.
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
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>
Sigh, this comes up every time someone mentions transmeta. Yes the "translator code" (its acually called Code Morphing) is cool. Yes it takes x86 and converts it to the crusoe's native instruction set which is actually a 4 way vliw processor. No that was not done to run multiple instruction sets. That was done so that some of the complexity of the chip was done in software instead of silicon, making the chip smaller and less power hungry. In fact they've repeatedly said that while its theoretically possible to code morph other instruction sets, they've designed the underlying, real instruction set to effectivly run x86 code. Just in a simple and more efficient manner. The whole hype about multiple instruction sets was from people speculating about what could be done with this cool new code morphing thing, and then others looking at the comments assuming it was already planned. Transmeta themselves never contributed to that hype in the slightest.