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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."
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?
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.