Posted by
Hemos
on from the conjecture-or-convinced dept.
vmircea writes "If you think clock speed is the most important measure of a processor, IBM's Bernie Meyerson wants you to reconsider. Meyerson, who heads research and development efforts for Big Blue's semiconductor group, says processor chip speed is old news. Go to ZDNet for the interview."
Ask the damn question!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
"If you think clock speed is the most important measure of a processor, IBM's Bernie Meyerson wants you to reconsider."
At no point do I see him ask "If clock speed isn't important, what is?" Of course it gets answeredin a round-about kind of way.. but still.
Re:Ask the damn question!
by
An+Onerous+Coward
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think the thing he was trying to focus on was their attempts to implement a "reconfigurable" or "programmable" chip. If this could be done well, I'm guessing it would take the whole "processor speed doesn't matter" thing to a whole new level, above what they teach in a basic computer architecture course.
Remember back when all the Pentium chips had "MMX" slapped onto the end of their names? MMX stood for "MultiMedia eXtensions," which were a set of operations programmers could use to speed up certain highly repetitive tasks like manipulating video or audio streams. I'm not familiar enough with them to provide a good example, but the point is that it is possible for a chip designer to implement a chip in such a way that it performs very well at certain tasks.
Make the chip configurable, and suddenly all this power falls into the hands of the programmer. So there would be certain situations where a 100MHz processor using the proper configuration could seriously outperform the same chip at ten times the clock speed, if the second was using a more general configuration.
--
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Poeple still want more ghz...
by
mw5299
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Its interesting that apple is releasing (in july) the IBM made g5 that can go to 2.5ghz. It seems like people still care if a prosessor can go "more ghz". I think it is smart what AMD did with there 3000+ chips(or an other somthing+ chip). It makes poeple think that prosesor runs faster when it realy doesn't.
What else besides games?
by
MacFury
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What other applications besides games really tax the CPU right now?
I do a fair amount of video editing and image manipulation, even still my two year old computer works fast enough for me...
Does the average Joe need the computing power they are given?
I dabble in image manipulation, but mainly i do music production on my computer. Mine's about 2 years old, too...Most of the time, it does great. However, once i get about 7-8 tracks in, depending on the kind of output, plus effects like reverb and compression, my CPU says, "Aw, HELL no!" and freezes my machine. Happened just yesterday..makes me wonder sometimes if 2 proc's might help.
Most audio production apps can take advantage of SMP. Even if his can't the extra CPU will be used by the OS for I/O and system processing. Add to that the fact that the most common CPU hogging thing is effects modules which are seperate processes and you can see where SMP helps. I just built a dual Opteron rig for a friend of mine, only 4GB of ram but he has slots for 4 more GB and he already has beta 64bit plugins. The machine I built him should last him until the hardware starts to get flaky in 3-5 years.
-- There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
What other applications besides games really tax the CPU right now?
Keeping a Gentoo system up-to-date?;-)
GNU Radio is a great example of something that is very cool, but requires more processing power than most people have. It's right on the horizon of feasibility (so it's not just a pipe dream totally out of reach) but still makes you ache for more power, more, more, more!!
-- As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
AMD has been using RISC-like architecture on their chips since the K-5. Remember the K-5? The K6 lineage expanded on this, as did the Athlon.
I'm not an AMD fangirl or anything but they've been at the "interpret x86 instructions with RISC architecture" game for coming up on a decade. Intel only caught on relatively recently with Banias and Dothan (aka Pentium-M, "Centrino") and are finding out the uncomfortable truth that these chips that operate at a slower clock speed are more efficient and do more per clock cycle than P4s.
And as per Itanium: there's a reason why people call it the Itanic.
-- Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Apple has been trying to get this message out for a while. We had a story a few months ago (lazy me, no link for you) about how Intel was dropping the clock from the branding of the processors.
Clock speed really does not have a direct correlation to computer speed anymore. It seems like we will see more of the trend of newer, better technology that runs at a lower rate but executes a lot more in one tick, so it is much faster. It seems that it will start at 1GHz and move up to 3 before somebody gets a new idea, makes a new "slow" processor and starts it over...
*Everyone* knows?
by
funkdid
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I think to the/. crowd this is certainly old news. Ever try to explain this to grandma? Or your girlfriend's little brother? *Most* people after my speach of how processors work say "Yeah but arent AMD chips slow? Like a Pentium is 3Ghz, AMDs are cheap (meaning cheaply made) right?"
So I "dumb" my speach down a bit and give it again. The masses don't want to know how processors work, they don't want to know about architecture, they want an even base line to measure performance. Most people think the Comp Usa rep is ripping them off and they are trying to feel good about their purchase, being an un-educated consumer.
By buying the high clock speed they can compare it to their neighboors and in their heads they have a Super-Fast PC.
I'd like to note that most people I talk to look at AMD like most people look at a Yugo. (remember those cars?) In spite of my advice that an AMD is like a new Honda for $2,000.
That's my 2 cents
--
I boycott signatures
Re:Sensationlist statement
by
frinkster
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I had a tough time translating his statements from management/consultant to english, but I think one of the things he was trying to say is that the cost and effort required to continually shrink the die and up the clock rate are growing quickly, so much so that IBM doesn't feel that it's worth it to focus on that aspect in the quest for improved performance.
IBM is surely going to continue to shrink the die and increase clock rate, but it seems as though for the same amount of R&D they feel that there are more gains in performance to be had by looking elsewhere.
Clock speed has never been the definitive CPU performance measurement. As everyone knows it is the Bogo MIP.
-- --
Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Uh, can you spell AMD
by
Omega1045
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Didn't AMD take this approach some years back? They have to name their processors to sounds like pentium clock speed ratings, but they have been preaching the idea that clock-speed is not the sole issue for years. I know IBM is technical leader, but it just smells like IBM, like Intel, are jumping on the AMD bandwagon, but they aren't calling it the AMD bandwagon.
--
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
FLOPS won't work; it ignores workloads that use integer math. It also ignores workloads that specialize in vector math. And workloads that depend a great deal on automated decision-making. And random-number generation.
The problem is that no matter what metric you use, it won't fit all cases. Different workloads have different requirements. Personally, I'd like to see programmable hardware...Essentially an FPGA section on CPUs. Programs would provide the OS's scheduler with a circuit layout, and the scheduler would have the layout programmed in when needed.
Each program doesn't necessarily have to have access to the whole grid array, either. The scheduler could divide the array into sections. One section would be for speeding up scheduler operations. The rest would be available to have programs loaded in. You wouldn't even need to erase one program's hardware when another program had something it wanted to implement. With the hardware divided, you could load the new program's code into an empty slot, and leave the old code available for the old program's next timeslice. (To prevent having to reprogram the FPGA section every time the program's turn came about.)
Re:Seems IBM is embracing open standards
by
SoopahMan
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I disagree - you're forgetting AMD. Intel has been pushing clock speed for a long time, and many consumers are still fooled by this engineered-for-marketing strategy.
But AMD very-much uses the x86 architecture, and has long emphasized things other than clock speed. They've already put into action several of the things IBM's Bernie Meyerson seems to think he brilliantly came up with:
Efficiency: Athlons just plain get more performance per clock than an Intel. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this including the length of the pipeline, but the design just gets more done with each tick. That's less complexity and less...
Power usage: Athlons have 10-12 pipeline stages compared to the Pentium 4's 30. Between that increased efficiency, and less need for a large cache (big pipeline means frequent cache hits), it can use far less power than a P4 for the same performance - and consequently generate much less heat.
Interacting with software: Also not new - more recent desktop AMD chips internally clock themselves up and down depending on whether you're idling or running an app. Laptop chips have done this for years. That means the invalid assumption PC novices make that leaving a PC on while they eat lunch will not use much power becomes valid. For the power user, the PC churns out less heat overall since it only pumps heat under peak usage.
There are things the guy lists that are just freakin' out there:
We are even building in the capability for the chip to physically morph, if required. For instance, you spot an excessive number of fails occurring in the memory--we have techniques in software that recognize those errors. But if it turns out that for whatever reason, one segment of the chip drives an extreme amount of correction, one can easily envision the system autonomically issuing a command to remove that segment.
Uh, dude, this isn't an episode of Transformers, it's a CPU. AMD and Intel already resolved this issue by building very strong chips that don't fail. Even if physically modifying the chip to lop off the bad parts is possible, I can only see it leading to a reduction in quality of chips produced, with manufacturers knowing that worst case, if it fails, it'll just lop itself to pieces.
Power is not for PC
by
rve
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The POWER architecture isnt really for the average Joe's computer, it is for servers. In servers, many tasks are done by coprocessors and independant subsystems without taxing the CPU. The extra CPU performance is now suddenly needed because IBM keeps encouraging ISV'S to write for Websphere, in Java, so you now need 10 times more memory and CPU performance than you previously did to perform the same task. In servers, the worst bottleneck at the moment are afaik still the moving parts in the disks and tapes.
The PPC is a cousin of the embedded version of the chip, where the performance per watt power usage is relevant. It is hugely successful.
Sales of Apples with desktop POWER chips aren't really significant. Although IBM aren't ready to admit it yet, the battle for the desktop is long over. No amount of performance advantage is going to outweigh the main advantage of the x86 architecture there: backward compatibility, preserving the value of past investments in software for the customer. IBM should know this, as they still make their zSeries mainframes compatible with the 40+ year old 360 architecture for the same reason.
In the PC, unlike most servers, most everything goes through the CPU, which is why for the average Joe raw CPU performance _does_ matter.
Re:Sensationlist statement
by
Arker
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I think you grok this well.
Clock speed has never been the main factor in the performance of your computer - it's just been a number that works well for marketing. Your typical modern cpu is idle most of the time anyway. When you increase the clock speed, it does increase performance, but not linearly - doubling the clock speed on your chip might only give you a 10% boost or so in terms of real world performance.
I remember back when the Pentium first came out, having two systems with P60s to compare, the only difference between them being that one had 4 times the cache memory onboard and, I believe, a better cache-logic implementation on board. The system with the superior motherboard was in a whole higher class, performance wise, in regards to every task we threw at it, although the effect was much more pronounced on some tasks than others, it was striking in every case.
As CPU power has been growing far faster than IO capabilities, I would expect the same sort of testing with new systems today would show even more dramatic effects.
Better IO handling is very important for many different applications. Just look at the difference between running an application that will fit in cache against one that requires constant work with your main RAM bank. It's huge. So is the difference between a program that will fit in main RAM and one that requires page swapping with VM. Massive difference. Increasing clock speed shaves a microsecond off here or there, but it does nothing about all the wasted cycles while the CPU waits on IO.
CPU speed over the past 20 years has increased incredibly, but IO capabilities in the PC haven't improved at anything like the same rate. Making CPUs smarter (not necessarily faster, but more efficient at using the speed they already have,) using bigger better designed caches and improving IO systems are likely to be much more efficient ways of increasing real world performance than cranking up the clock speed.
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Re:Speed
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Oddly enough, this idea sounds like a research paper I read... like 4 years ago, now; and I'm sure there were more earlier, as the paper referened other similar adaptable architectures.
The drawbacks: you either need a FPGA that you can reprogram very quickly (on the order of nanoseconds) or you need a task that takes a long time and can more than benefit from having to take the time it takes to reprogram the FPGA. The latter is not terribly useful for your average desktop machine.
thoughts on clockspeed and CPU power/ratings
by
itzdandy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
here is a thought.
When you buy a car, you don't just consider how fast it goes, you consider fuel economy/comfort/quality etc. this could be applied to CPUs
for instance, you buy a new DeLL/HP/whatever, the machine has 3 numbes on it. 12/16/65 - which means, 12 is the general office app benchmark, 16 is the gaming benchmark, and 65 is the mean power usage of the machine.
so a good office machine is a 14/2/30, but if you are playing games, you need a 6/26/130, you don't care as much about the power bill or how fast office computes a6:c6*c14 whatever. these numbers would be linear, as in the nex-gen would just have higher numbers.
Each computers label would ave a description of the rating above the label saying "look at the killer gamer system" or whatever.
I can see the arguement of the system being confusing, but i'd take the least confusing method that was effective, and i think this would be effective.
------------------
Something like this could translate over to server side with web/fileserving/powerreq or something, but it would allow companies like AMD and IBM who have not pushed the MHz myth to the extreme to allow their product to compete on merrit not Mhz.
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At no point do I see him ask "If clock speed isn't important, what is?" Of course it gets answeredin a round-about kind of way.. but still.
Its interesting that apple is releasing (in july) the IBM made g5 that can go to 2.5ghz. It seems like people still care if a prosessor can go "more ghz". I think it is smart what AMD did with there 3000+ chips(or an other somthing+ chip). It makes poeple think that prosesor runs faster when it realy doesn't.
I do a fair amount of video editing and image manipulation, even still my two year old computer works fast enough for me...
Does the average Joe need the computing power they are given?
is the clock speed still relevant for RISC chips too? or should that be measured differently too?
i would think the clock speed has more meaning for RISC processors.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Apple has been trying to get this message out for a while. We had a story a few months ago (lazy me, no link for you) about how Intel was dropping the clock from the branding of the processors.
Clock speed really does not have a direct correlation to computer speed anymore. It seems like we will see more of the trend of newer, better technology that runs at a lower rate but executes a lot more in one tick, so it is much faster. It seems that it will start at 1GHz and move up to 3 before somebody gets a new idea, makes a new "slow" processor and starts it over...
So I "dumb" my speach down a bit and give it again. The masses don't want to know how processors work, they don't want to know about architecture, they want an even base line to measure performance. Most people think the Comp Usa rep is ripping them off and they are trying to feel good about their purchase, being an un-educated consumer.
By buying the high clock speed they can compare it to their neighboors and in their heads they have a Super-Fast PC.
I'd like to note that most people I talk to look at AMD like most people look at a Yugo. (remember those cars?) In spite of my advice that an AMD is like a new Honda for $2,000.
That's my 2 cents
I boycott signatures
I had a tough time translating his statements from management/consultant to english, but I think one of the things he was trying to say is that the cost and effort required to continually shrink the die and up the clock rate are growing quickly, so much so that IBM doesn't feel that it's worth it to focus on that aspect in the quest for improved performance.
IBM is surely going to continue to shrink the die and increase clock rate, but it seems as though for the same amount of R&D they feel that there are more gains in performance to be had by looking elsewhere.
Clock speed has never been the definitive CPU performance measurement. As everyone knows it is the Bogo MIP.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Didn't AMD take this approach some years back? They have to name their processors to sounds like pentium clock speed ratings, but they have been preaching the idea that clock-speed is not the sole issue for years. I know IBM is technical leader, but it just smells like IBM, like Intel, are jumping on the AMD bandwagon, but they aren't calling it the AMD bandwagon.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
FLOPS won't work; it ignores workloads that use integer math. It also ignores workloads that specialize in vector math. And workloads that depend a great deal on automated decision-making. And random-number generation.
The problem is that no matter what metric you use, it won't fit all cases. Different workloads have different requirements. Personally, I'd like to see programmable hardware...Essentially an FPGA section on CPUs. Programs would provide the OS's scheduler with a circuit layout, and the scheduler would have the layout programmed in when needed.
Each program doesn't necessarily have to have access to the whole grid array, either. The scheduler could divide the array into sections. One section would be for speeding up scheduler operations. The rest would be available to have programs loaded in. You wouldn't even need to erase one program's hardware when another program had something it wanted to implement. With the hardware divided, you could load the new program's code into an empty slot, and leave the old code available for the old program's next timeslice. (To prevent having to reprogram the FPGA section every time the program's turn came about.)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
But AMD very-much uses the x86 architecture, and has long emphasized things other than clock speed. They've already put into action several of the things IBM's Bernie Meyerson seems to think he brilliantly came up with:
- Efficiency: Athlons just plain get more performance per clock than an Intel. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this including the length of the pipeline, but the design just gets more done with each tick. That's less complexity and less...
- Power usage: Athlons have 10-12 pipeline stages compared to the Pentium 4's 30. Between that increased efficiency, and less need for a large cache (big pipeline means frequent cache hits), it can use far less power than a P4 for the same performance - and consequently generate much less heat.
- Interacting with software: Also not new - more recent desktop AMD chips internally clock themselves up and down depending on whether you're idling or running an app. Laptop chips have done this for years. That means the invalid assumption PC novices make that leaving a PC on while they eat lunch will not use much power becomes valid. For the power user, the PC churns out less heat overall since it only pumps heat under peak usage.
There are things the guy lists that are just freakin' out there:Uh, dude, this isn't an episode of Transformers, it's a CPU. AMD and Intel already resolved this issue by building very strong chips that don't fail. Even if physically modifying the chip to lop off the bad parts is possible, I can only see it leading to a reduction in quality of chips produced, with manufacturers knowing that worst case, if it fails, it'll just lop itself to pieces.
The POWER architecture isnt really for the average Joe's computer, it is for servers. In servers, many tasks are done by coprocessors and independant subsystems without taxing the CPU. The extra CPU performance is now suddenly needed because IBM keeps encouraging ISV'S to write for Websphere, in Java, so you now need 10 times more memory and CPU performance than you previously did to perform the same task. In servers, the worst bottleneck at the moment are afaik still the moving parts in the disks and tapes.
The PPC is a cousin of the embedded version of the chip, where the performance per watt power usage is relevant. It is hugely successful.
Sales of Apples with desktop POWER chips aren't really significant. Although IBM aren't ready to admit it yet, the battle for the desktop is long over. No amount of performance advantage is going to outweigh the main advantage of the x86 architecture there: backward compatibility, preserving the value of past investments in software for the customer. IBM should know this, as they still make their zSeries mainframes compatible with the 40+ year old 360 architecture for the same reason.
In the PC, unlike most servers, most everything goes through the CPU, which is why for the average Joe raw CPU performance _does_ matter.
I think you grok this well.
Clock speed has never been the main factor in the performance of your computer - it's just been a number that works well for marketing. Your typical modern cpu is idle most of the time anyway. When you increase the clock speed, it does increase performance, but not linearly - doubling the clock speed on your chip might only give you a 10% boost or so in terms of real world performance.
I remember back when the Pentium first came out, having two systems with P60s to compare, the only difference between them being that one had 4 times the cache memory onboard and, I believe, a better cache-logic implementation on board. The system with the superior motherboard was in a whole higher class, performance wise, in regards to every task we threw at it, although the effect was much more pronounced on some tasks than others, it was striking in every case.
As CPU power has been growing far faster than IO capabilities, I would expect the same sort of testing with new systems today would show even more dramatic effects.
Better IO handling is very important for many different applications. Just look at the difference between running an application that will fit in cache against one that requires constant work with your main RAM bank. It's huge. So is the difference between a program that will fit in main RAM and one that requires page swapping with VM. Massive difference. Increasing clock speed shaves a microsecond off here or there, but it does nothing about all the wasted cycles while the CPU waits on IO.
CPU speed over the past 20 years has increased incredibly, but IO capabilities in the PC haven't improved at anything like the same rate. Making CPUs smarter (not necessarily faster, but more efficient at using the speed they already have,) using bigger better designed caches and improving IO systems are likely to be much more efficient ways of increasing real world performance than cranking up the clock speed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Oddly enough, this idea sounds like a research paper I read... like 4 years ago, now; and I'm sure there were more earlier, as the paper referened other similar adaptable architectures.
The drawbacks: you either need a FPGA that you can reprogram very quickly (on the order of nanoseconds) or you need a task that takes a long time and can more than benefit from having to take the time it takes to reprogram the FPGA. The latter is not terribly useful for your average desktop machine.
here is a thought.
When you buy a car, you don't just consider how fast it goes, you consider fuel economy/comfort/quality etc. this could be applied to CPUs
for instance, you buy a new DeLL/HP/whatever, the machine has 3 numbes on it. 12/16/65 - which means, 12 is the general office app benchmark, 16 is the gaming benchmark, and 65 is the mean power usage of the machine.
so a good office machine is a 14/2/30, but if you are playing games, you need a 6/26/130, you don't care as much about the power bill or how fast office computes a6:c6*c14 whatever. these numbers would be linear, as in the nex-gen would just have higher numbers.
Each computers label would ave a description of the rating above the label saying "look at the killer gamer system" or whatever.
I can see the arguement of the system being confusing, but i'd take the least confusing method that was effective, and i think this would be effective.
------------------
Something like this could translate over to server side with web/fileserving/powerreq or something, but it would allow companies like AMD and IBM who have not pushed the MHz myth to the extreme to allow their product to compete on merrit not Mhz.
thoughts??