Intel Devises Chip Speed Breakthrough

Chad Wood writes "According to the New York Times (free reg. req.), Intel has demonstrated a research breakthrough, making silicon chips that can switch light like electricity. The article explains:''This opens up whole new areas for Intel,' said Mario Paniccia, a an Intel physicist, who started the previously secret Intel research program to explore the possibility of using standard semiconductor parts to build optical networks. 'We're trying to siliconize photonics.' The invention demonstrates for the first time, Intel researchers said, that ultrahigh-speed fiberoptic equipment can be produced at personal computer industry prices. As the costs of communicating between computers and chips falls, the barrier to building fundamentally new kinds of computers not limited by physical distance should become a reality, experts say.'"

Comments

Re:NYTimes Reg

[Drantin]

It's actually easier to google for the URL then click the link to it so you have google.com as a referrer...

Re:EMP

[Dark Lord Seth]

But now what are we going to use against the "squiddies" when they come for our hovercrafts?

180mm smoothbore cannons and armour-piercing rounds.

Re:Still binary..

[eht]

Actually base-10 is a terrible base to use, 12 or 60 makes much more sense, with the ideal being base-120, many more factors making math of all sorts much easier, one reason I highly dislike the metric system.

Re:Still binary..

[fredrikj]

I highly dislike the metric system

Yeah, base 12/7.33/3.762/15.9 (it depends on what you're measuring and the position of the digit) is so much better.

Intel compilers lower AMD CPU performance?

[G3ckoG33k]

I found the following little study here. Read on:

As part of my study of Operating Systems and embedded systems, one of
the things I've been looking at is compilers. I'm interested in
analyzing how different compilers optimize code for different
platforms. As part of this comparison, I was looking at the Intel
Compiler and how it optimizes code. The Intel Compilers have a free
evaluation download from here:
http://www.intel.com/products/software/inde x.htm?i id=Corporate+Header_prod_softwr&#compilers

One of the things that the version 8.0 of the Intel compiler included
was an "Intel-specific" flag. According to the documentation, binaries
compiled with this flag would only run on Intel processors and would
include Intel-specific optimizations to make them run faster. The
documentation was unfortunately lacking in explaining what these
optimizations were, so I decided to do some investigating.

First I wanted to pick a primarily CPU-bound test to run, so I chose
SPEC CPU2000. The test system was a P4 3.2G Extreme Edition with 1 gig
of ram running WIndows XP Pro. First I compiled and ran spec with the
"generic x86 flag" (-QxW), which compiles code to run on any x86
processor. After running the generic version, I recompiled and ran
spec with the "Intel-specific flag" (-QxN) to see what kind of
difference that would make. For most benchmarks, there was not very
much change, but for 181.mcf, there was a win of almost 22% !

Curious as to what sort of optimizations the compiler was doing to
allow the Intel-specific version to run 22% faster, I tried running
the same binary on my friend's computer. His computer, the second test
machine, was an AMD FX51, also with 1 gig of ram, running Windows XP
Pro. First I ran the "generic x86" binaries on the FX51, and then
tried to run the "Intel-only" binaries. The Intel-specific ones
printed out an error message saying that the processor was not
supported and exited. This wasn't very helpful, was it true that only
Intel processors could take advantage of this performance boost?

I started mucking around with a dissassembly of the Intel-specific
binary and found one particular call (proc_init_N) that appeared to be
performing this check. As far as I can tell, this call is supposed to
verify that the CPU supports SSE and SSE2 and it checks the CPUID to
ensure that its an Intel processor. I wrote a quick utility which I
call iccOut, to go through a binary that has been compiled with this
Intel-only flag and remove that check.

Once I ran the binary that was compiled with the Intel-specific flag
(-QxN) through iccOut, it was able to run on the FX51. Much to my
surprise, it ran fine and did not miscompare. On top of that, it got
the same 22% performance boost that I saw on the Pentium4 with an
actual Intel processor. This is very interesting to me, since it
appears that in fact no Intel-specific optimization has been done if
the AMD processor is also capable to taking advantage of these same
optimizations. If I'm missing something, I'd love for someone to point
it out for me. From the way it looks right now, it appears that Intel
is simply "cheating" to make their processors look better against
competitor's processors.

Links:
Intel Compiler:http://www.intel.com/products/software/in dex.htm?iid=Corporate+Header_prod_softwr&#compiler s

Here is the text: /*
* iccOut 1.0
*
* This program enables programs compiled with the intel compiler
using the
* -xN flag to run on non-intel processors. This can sometimes result
in
* large performance increases, depending on the application. Note
that even
* though the check will be removed, the CPU runni