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Strained Silicon to Perpetuate Moore's Law
An anonymous reader noted a story floating around about a new technology known as strained silicon (or maybe 'Stained' since the article calls it both ;) which AMD & IBM figure will make CPUs 24% faster. A little bit on how it works as well, but not much substance.
So you idiots won't get to see what I was going to say about this subject.
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Ok, ok. I'll say what I was gonna say. Combine strained silicon with 0.13 micron, super cooling, and, say, 1 volt, with a simpler instruction set, where each instruction is executed in, say, four clocks, and you could get the equivalent of 8 ghz performance (say, if you extrapolate the performance of current 2 ghz Intel processors) out of a processor running at, say, 2 ghz. That is my estimate.
Actually, I think the most ridiculous thing about today's processors is the fact that their instruction set is so damn complicated that the processor spends a ton of time just decoding the instructions. Why not, instead, simplify the instruction set, based on studies of patterns of code produced by contemporary compilers, and increase the speed of execution without having to increase the clock, strain the silicon, etc...
Believe it or not, I know of a computer that was built in the late 70's that could multiply numbers faster than today's fastest Pentiums can. It was a 4-bit computer, with a 16-bit instruction set, and each instruction had within it two instructions and a sub-instruction. The computer was dirt slow, but the instruction set was designed according to the needed software patterns, so that things got executed FAST. The guy who built that computer was a true hacker, not the contemporary h4x0rz that invent the psychopath instruction sets of today's processors.