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Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
An anonymous reader writes "Based on decades of growth in CPU speeds, Santa was supposed to drop off my 10 Ghz PC a few weeks back, but all I got was this lousy 2 Ghz dual processor box -- like it's still 2001...oh please! Dr. Dobbs says the free ride is over, and we now have to come up with some concurrency, but all I have is dollars... What gives?"
Multi-processing is the way to go. We need to do that to help heat dissipation...
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
I remember the old days, when programmers nudged every
single bit of speed and capability out of the machines they had.
When computer engineers, faced with limits, still made magic
happen.
I hope this ushers that habit back into the profession. We have a lot of great technology, right now, let's find a better way to use it and make it more ubiquitous.
Sigs cause cancer.
True we have found limits to materials hence we need to think out of the box and find new materials.
Linux is like a teepee. It has no windows, no gates, and there's an Apache inside.
To my mind it _might_ be a good thing if the rampant speed-advance slowed (a lot).
Consider:
We might get some return to efficient coding being the norm, instead of writing systems anyhow and throwing more/faster hardware at it until it runs acceptably (Microsoft; its you I'm looking at!)
Your (and your business') desktop machine might _not_ become obsolete in no more than 2 years, and mmight continue in useful service as something more sensible than a whole PC doing the job of a router...
Processor designers might spend more time (i know they already spend some) on innovating new ideas, rather than solving the problems with just ramping up clock speeds.
Cooling/Quietening technology might have a snowball's chance in hell of catching up with heat output?
(and the wild dreaming one)
Games writers might remember about gameplay, rather than better coloured lighting...
If, as the Dr. Dobbs article says, "the free lunch is over", then the only sensible thing to do is make do with what we have now. For goshssakes, people, the computers we have now are already insanely over-powered. How many more gigahertz do we need my life already?
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
The difference between Intel and AMD's cpu architecture yields similar performance but at very different clock speeds(AMD's 3200+ runs at 2.2GHz). Other aspects of PC performance continue to improve, so as long as the trend is towards greater overall system performance, clock speed matters less. And greater parallelism is a good way to achieve this.
But now even you cheapest PC covers most users needs. So the CPU designers will continue to inovate but they will find that people will be able to keep their PCs and other electronics longer. Fundementally, the CPU business will start loosing steam and slow down. When people don't need to get new machines, they won't. The precieved premium for the high end products is getting less and less.
The fallacy here is that the clock speed has to keep doubling. Moore's law says that the number of transistors on a chip doubles each 18 month period, and we're still pretty close to that.
;^)
Intel has just caved on the speed doubling in particular, by knocking the clock speed off their product designations, mainly because the Pentium M chips were running significantly faster than the same-speed P4's. AMD's Athlons have been 'fudging' their numbers by having the product number match not their clock speed, but that of the roughly equivalent P4 chip.
Meanwhile, cache sizes are up, instruction pipes are up, hyperthreading has been here a while, multi-core chips are coming down the pike... we're still getting speed gains, just not in raw clocks.
At the same time, the Amiga philosphy of offloading to other processors is truth, with more transistors on the high-end graphics processors than there are on the CPUs!
I hate to say it, but what do you think you need 10GHz for anyway? Unless you've got a REALLY fat pipe, there's a limit on how much pr0n you can process
The high-end machines do make good foot-warmers in cold climes.
Design for Use, not Construction!
...as we've been saying for, oh, at least the last 20 years, which is about the time I was writing up my Ph.D. thesis on concurrent languages and hardware.
As far as I can see (being slightly out of the language/computer design area these days), concurrent machines and languages aren't taking off for the same reasons they didn't take off in the 1980's:
There's more than a handful of generalisations there, but in short: Moore's Law means that nobody is going to buy a highly concurrent computer when consumer PC's are still getting faster, and the people who really need high parallelism (modellers and the like) have their own special-purpose toys to work with.
Without a major breakthrough, which isn't something I'd bet on, I'll agree that we are very close to the limits of silicon based CPUs.
Remember when 9600 baud was close to the limit of copper? Then 33.6. Then they changed how the pair was used, and made 128K ISDN. Then they changed it again and we're getting 7-10 MB DSL....sometimes even faster depending.
I find it hard to say the we're close to the limits of any technology in the computer/telecom field. Someone always seems to find a new way around it.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
That's not true at all. At a mere 2GHz, light can only travel 15cm (6in) through free space in one cycle -- hardly a long distance. Add in modulation and switching delays, and you really can't ignore the board-level latency even with optical interconnect. On the other hand, even on-chip communication takes multiple clock cycles these days, so maybe it wouldn't be that much worse..?
Those two conditions are not mutally exclusive. Actually, they appear to be strongly correlated.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
My other reasons are a little more subjective, but are largely to do with the fact that both AMD and Intel are investing heavily in developing multi-core CPUs. In Intel's case this has involved the very public scrapping of a promised CPU and a drastic revamp of its roadmap. While breakthroughs in CPU design have come from academia and other companies, the vast majority have come from Intel and IBM. However, neither are investing the R&D in ramping clock speeds ever higher and are focussing on multi-core designs instead.
Hence my original statement: based on what we current know about silicon based CPU design, we are at (or very close to) the limits of what is possible. Further R&D or a breakthrough might push that a little or even a significant amount higher, but without the massive R&D efforts of IBM and Intel, the chances of this happening are slim. Also, if the market does start to shift toward multi-core designs which seems very likely, then the inclination of people to look into better wats of doing things in the old way is likely to be reduced further.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Dude, that is what Intel was doing until AMD came along and forced them to get into this "keeping up with the Joneses" routine.
I can't decide whether to put a smiley face on this or not. I was being sarcastic, but for all we know it might be partially true!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
### For >95% of users, I see no need to have computers faster than 2Ghz.
As long as there are games and a large number of computer users who want to play them, there will be a need for faster CPUs. While on the graphic side the main work is already done by the GPU, the physics and AI are still done by the CPU. And oposed to the graphics, where games are already quite advanced, AI and physics tends still to be rather primitive in games and will for sure need a lot of additional CPU.
No,
The lack of breakthrough will be due to something entirely different.
So far we have been exploiting the fruits of fundamental material science, physics and chemistry research done in the 60-es (if not earlier), 70-es and to a small extent in the 80-es. There has been nothing fundamentally new done in the 90-es. A lot of nice engineering - yes. A lot of clever manufacturing techniques silicon of insulator being a prime example - yes. But nothing as far as the underlying science is concerned.
This is not just the semiconductor industry. The situation is the same across the board. The charitable foundations and the state which used to be the prime source of fundamental research funding now require a project plan and a date when the supposed product will deliver a result (thinly disguised words for profit). They also do not invest into projects longer then 3 years.
As a result noone looks at things that may bring a breakthrough and there shall be no breakthroughs until this situation changes
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
GaAs has a big problem with yield loss in manufacturing.
As such, it is ok for small stuff (under 20 transistors)but is not going to fly for million transistor CPU's
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
?Andy giveth, and Bill taketh away.?
That's only half right, because you don't have to let Bill take away. KDE3 runs well on a 233MHz PII and 64MB of RAM, almost a whole order of magnitude less of hardware than it takes to make XP happy. The picture is more drastic when you consider the virus load most XP setups must endure. You need a 2GHz processor just to keep running while your computer serves out spam and kiddie porn.
The changes Dr. Dobbs so wants are already happening in free software. There's a reason things like Arts can play music, games and system noises all at the same time while software on M$ has trouble sharing sound devices. If Beowulf is not a 10 year head start on concurrency, I don't know what is.
Quoth SVDave:
I don't predict good things for Microsoft. Longhorn in 2007, anyone?
Perhaps old Billy should put his money into processor development instead of SCO and FUD.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Mod that +1 insightful.
I might also throw in the possibility that, since the end of the Cold War, there has been very little incentive for governments, etc, to back fundamental research that might (a decade later) lead to radically new technologies. Governments like the status quo, they like the future to be predictable. Fundamental research (except perhaps in really esoteric areas like cosmology or areas with practical benefits for them like medicine) scares the willies out of the people in power -- it might upset their apple cart.
-- Alastair
superconductors is the way to go for highest speeds/most concentrated processing power, due to extremely small power dissipation and extremely high clock frequencies (60 GHz for logic is relatively easy right now), but the problem is that after someone invests $3B in a modern semiconductor fab they do NOT want to build a $30M top-of the line superconductor fab to compete with it.
I'd think the more likely reasons would have to do, for starters, with consumers not wanting or being able to afford a computer that requires constant cooling with liquid nitrogen (or even worse, liquid helium) to work.
Also, the linear speed might be too high to read without interleaving (which pretty much negates the advantage of the higher speed)
Some quick calculations:
Assuming that a 3.5" drive has 2.75" platters, which would have a circumferance of 8.64", would have a speed of 129,590 in/min at 15,000 RPM, which equals 122.7 MPH.
If we assume the 5.25" drive has 4.5" platters, these would have a circumferance of 14.14", which translates to 212,057 in/min or 200.8 MPH.
Also, the 5.25" platters are 268% larger (15.9 in^2 vs 5.9 in^2). Considering that the larger platters will also probably have to be thicker to prevent warping, an estimate of the platters having 3 times as much mass isn't unreasonable. This means much more powerful spindle motors, along with more heat, noise, and vibration.
None of these are insurmountable problems, but I doubt you could solve them economically enough to bring the unit price down so that it's competitive with smaller drives. The platter circumferance in the 3.5" drive is 8.64", which at 15,000 RPM is 129590 in/min, which translates to 122.7 MPH.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I haven't been in the superconducter field for ten years now... what's the technology being used for the switches/logic gates?
As for GaAs, it's alive and well in the world of RF (analog) amplifiers going up to 100 GHz - I think the current technology uses a 6" wafer. (see, for example, WIN Semiconductor)
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
> ...which means that signals have to be able
> to get from one side of the system
> to the other within one clock cycle.
In a pipelined CPU (which accounts for nearly all in use today), it will take many many cycles for it to move from one end of the die to the other as the instruction executes. You're right, the bigger the die, the harder it is to have tight clocks if you spread everything out. But its just never done that way...
There's a big difference between a reasonable prediction and saying ridiculous things to inflate your stock price. I don't think it was reasonable for Intel to say, in 2002, that we will have a 10ghz part in the near future. Perhaps saying, 'Our goal is to reach 10Ghz by 2006', is a little more reasonable. But Craig Barrett and Co. don't talk that way (neither did Jerry Sanders of AMD). These statements could be looked at as devices to drive up stock prices. Finally, Intel said that the PIV's would hit 10Ghz. You can rest assured that's never going to happen.
Given that a liquid nitrogen cascade cooling system is beyond the reach of most consumers, so-called "high temperature superconductors" are basically out of the question. Until we actually have cost-effective room temperature superconductors, I kind of doubt we're going to see much of this. Unless you mean something different than "superconductor" when you say superconductor, I'm at a loss as to where you are going with this.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The government pumped over a half billion a year into the Human Genome project, and spent $1.6 billion on nanotechnology last year. The government is still willing to spend money on basic research, but I doubt they are willing to create a whole new agency, such as NASA. They would rather have private companies do the work (even if federally funded), then create a new class of federal employees.
I also think you are assuming malice on the part of the government, when instead you should be assuming stupidity. And, since it is a democracy, you don't have to look far to find the root of that stupidity.
Actually they have proactivly developed new thingys ;)
I'd like to note that the average 3Ghz PC can do MORE than the eqivalant of a 10Ghz 5Mhz 8086. Don't forget that it's not just your CPU doing math now days, it's that fancy $400 super-computer rivaling video card you've got too.
In a pipelined CPU (which accounts for nearly all in use today), it will take many many cycles for it to move from one end of the die to the other as the instruction executes. You're right, the bigger the die, the harder it is to have tight clocks if you spread everything out. But its just never done that way...
Very true.
Still, the signal needs to be able to cross the distance of the stage in your pipeline during the clock cycle. Smaller stages still mean you can have faster clock rates, as the intel chips demonstrate. All the clock rate benefits have come by making stages smaller (whether by reducing their functionality, optimizing their design, or shrinking the process). It seems we've reached the limit of how small they can be made, with intel seeing not just diminishing but vanishing returns of reducing the stage size to be able to bump up the clockrate.