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The Year 2004 in Microprocessors
DeanMan writes "From spintronics to clockless CPUs, 2004 was a year of process and research in the microprocessor industry. As a way to transition into the new year, this article offers a month-by-month look at the highlights of the 2004 microprocessor timeline."
I can't believe you'd post this story and the year isn't even out yet.
how does that work, someone enlighten me please.
Le français vous intéresse?
No mention of FPGAs?
IBM is a news source now, eh?
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
January: 2004 'Linux on the desktop' year
February: Nevermind...
Intel's plan all along has been to reduce the size of their pipeline stages in order to increase the possible clock rate. However, with the halt of the 4GHz processor, and their new found interest in multicore chips, it'll be interesting to see how they'll compare with FPGAs in the upcoming years since both offer what the other is looking for. Intel want to be parallel, and FPGAs want to be sequentially quicker. The only difference is that Intel has been researching how to be quicker for a lot longer than FPGAs have been around so the guys at Xilinx shouldn't have too much difficulty following Moore's Law, whereas Intel might have more difficulty expanding into multiple cores since their chips are already huge. Who will win out in the end? Will Intel start snatching up companies like Celoxica and Xilinx in the coming years?
Quick summary for slashdot's readers:
1.AMD rocks (generally good, til their CPU prices are lower Intel's and we can overclock cheap Athlons to save some $$$)
2. Intel sucks (Pentium IV = really bad, PentiumM = good but pricy, but we still hate intel today, because they are evil)
3. IBM rocks (good boys, cause they support Linux and can beat SCO's ass)
4. There are some companies in a world but we don't give a shit until Linux can run on their processors.
The space savings in the clockless CPUs is worth it, plus you don't have to keep winding them up all the time.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Whoever read that article line by line and clicked all the links wins the Geek of the Year award for 2004.
One should remember that clockless design
poses two huge difficulties:
1) verification (both logical and timing);
2) in-chip noise.
Clocking allows oscillations created
by generating edges to fade out before
the sampling edge.
In clockless designs signals change whenever they
want in a sense, so sampling may occur while
the noise (parasitic oscillations) is still high,
and wrong values will be stored/used.
Just think how much trouble a clockless CPU would have saved leading up to Y2K.
Unknown host pong.
light based processors are PROHAMMER http://www.hammerrevolution.com/ --;
Actually that supposed to be a joke :)
Intel doesn't suck, but they made so many bad and stupid marketing decisions recently that slashdot's community doesn't like Intel too much.
Do you remember "PentiumIV will make Internet faster" marketing campaign? Or soap gigahertz war? CPU ratio lock? And so on.
Amazing guys at Intel can do amazing things but bad marking can easily kill it.
primer post del MMV : ), segun hora española ----- Truman Burbank
This is an informative source of links about what happened in the last year, but the author almost sounds surprised that so much has happened in one year. I have always been of the belief that the rate of innovation has been increasing on a yearly basis. As impressed as I am with some of the things that have been developed this last year, I am not terribly surprised that this much has happened.
The space savings in the clockless CPUs is worth it, plus you don't have to keep winding them up all the time.
But HOW i supposed to check a time with the clockless CPU?!
They must first create some kind of clock-coprocessor before releasing clockless CPU to market!
Remember IBM's microprocessor history that was posted to Slashdot a week or so back? I have to say, this one is far more even handed to the competition. Quite a lot of mentions of SPARC for the first time.
But this one line cracks me up...
American Technology Research predicts that Sun® and IBM® are well positioned to capture the 64-bit desktop market since both use the Opteron processor as an integral part of upcoming product lines and both have initiated flexible CPU roadmaps.
Sun? IBM? Capture the desktop market? My, these folks at American Technology Research much be geniuses! Or is that genusi?
FWIW, Sun has been doing 64 bit computing for quite some time now with the 64 bit SPARC chips it has been putting out for ages. But Sun Microsystems and IBM, masters of the 64 bit desktop? Oh boy.
"IBM debuts Cell processors, designed to be used in workstations, Sony PlayStations gaming consoles, and in Toshiba televisions. Programming the processor is said to be relatively easy."
How much did they have to couch it? "Relatively easy?" "Said to be..." ?
Translation for the technical crowd:
"Programming a cell processor is hard."
It was picking up the new 40lb+ self-winding computers to shake them daily that was getting to me.
On the plus side, you should see how big my shoulders are!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A hybrid might ease us into all optical chips.
Why is everyone dropping this field ? Quantum is way off in the distance and so is spintronic.
Using optical buses would reduce wiring complexity too.
2004 seems to continue several years more.
"November
Plastic electronics start to be considered for more uses, and Infineon demonstrates a new technique in which two chips are sandwiched together and interconnect among hundreds of surface contact pads.
ARM plans a design center in India. By 2008, China will knock Japan out of the top spot as consumer of chips.
AMD sees a bright future, and signs a second fabrication partner to start in 2006."
Electronic signals travel at 80% of the speed of light. Why invest 100s of billions developing optical technology for another 20% speed when electron signalling is almost as good?
(Lower powered): Synchronous processors vs Asynchronous processors: the battle has started ... ;) (e.g. Pentium-M vs UltraSparc)
open4free © : Happy BirthDay Earth, 2005 years old!!!, ;DDD
Maybe because the heat created by electron resistance would be less if it was optical. Not that there aren't HUGE problems to overcome with optical interfaces, particularly if you don't just skip to using optical-based cores, instead of trying to interface electron-based cores with optical buses...
Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep in a shared include somewhere.
WinNT4,GameCube,mac,MarsLandRover powerpc compatable
The article claims that Sun is outsourcing Niagara, which is a 65Nm process to Fujitsu. This is absolutely false. Niagara is to debut in 2005-2006 according to Sun and on 90Nm technology not 2007.
9 10
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040
Since the chip is already in the Sun labs how can it be 65Nm? No fab, in my knowledge, is ready for 65Nm yet,
http://aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=65000293
Also sun never claimed to outsource all chip manufacturing to Fujitsu. The article is based on blurbs from unreliable sources, example geek.net.
This is the second IBM article to calim that Sun is outsourcing all chip desgin and manufacturing to fujitsu. Is this some sort of FUD IBM is trying to spread?
And that is the real story of desktop computer technology in 2004.
It's no longer how fast you can crank up the CPU speed, it's now how fast the rest of the system runs. Look at what we have now on desktop machines:
1. The development of faster motherboard interconnects with improved chipsets and things like HyperTransport and its competitors.
2. The wide availability of PC3200 (DDR-400) DDR-SDRAM system RAM, with even faster RAM coming over the next 18-24 months.
3. The development of AGP 8x and new PCI Express connections for graphics cards with 3-D processing ability that would be the domain of ultra-expensive workstations only a few years ago.
4. The development of ATA-100/133 IDE, Serial ATA and soon Serial ATA-II IDE, and UltraSCSI 160/320 interfaces and 10,000+ RPM drives with 8 to 16 MB on-drive memory caches for very fast hard disk access. Even optical disk drives are benefiting from these faster interfaces.
5. The very wide availability of 100Base-T Ethernet connections on most motherboards, plus some motherboards now sport 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet connections.
6. The near-universal availability of USB 2.0 connections and increasing use of IEEE-1394 connections to external devices, which makes the use of external disk drives to back up data and connect to digital camcorders possible.
All of these developments have resulted in vastly faster computers in terms of overall speed even if you don't have the fastest CPU installed on the motherboard.
I'm not such a nerd
/. haiku
I didn't click on the link
and R-T-F-A.
-w
Signals propagation in wires is around 50% to 60% of light speed so you wouldn't gain that much speed since interconect delays are not the only limiting factor. I also don't believe any photodetectors can switch at over 3 GHz.
Asynchronous CPU's have been around since at least the mid 60's. The GE-600/Honeywell-6000 series had several separate parts to the CPU that ran indenpendently. IIRC up to 5 instructions could be executed at the same time in different parts of the CPU.