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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.
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...
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!
There is no substitute for knowing how to write your own sort routines, specialized linked lists, and binary trees.
What about knowing how to use the libraries that have these functions built in, such as the stl? You might not be 100% as efficient with the libraries, but you can be sure that those libraries are tested and optimized, and if you write these functions yourself, they might be buggy and will most likely be slower than the what comes with the compiler.
Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!
There is no substitute for knowing how to write your own sort routines, specialized linked lists, and binary trees.
Hogwash! Write first, optimize later...or in the real world: write first, optimize if the customer complains. Even then, what are the chances that I can write a better sorting algorithm than one included in a standard library that was written by some who studied sorting algorithms? Close to zero.
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.
Maybe so, but it can (and should) be done in specific cases. For example, I maintain a library of binary tree functions, and I do use them frequently. They are well tested and perform beautifully. However, a project I completed recently required a large amount of data to be traversed in a specific manner, so we designed and built our own BTA--specifically optimized for the task.
As you know, poorly designed code will bubble up through the code and bite you in the end... and your project will suffer from it.
Sigs cause cancer.
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..?
### 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/
Computers won't be fast enough until they can do anything we'd want of them near instantly. If I have to wait for feedback, it's not fast enough.
My Athlon64 3200, which isn't top-of-the-line but it's pretty close, still takes quite a bit of time to convert a DVD to divx. It takes a few minutes (because IO needs to get faster) to copy large volumes of files. Photoshop filters on huge, detailed files can take a few minutes to run. Machines only slightly slower choke on playback of HDTV. I can't imagine how long it takes to encode.
When I can do all those things instantly, do accurate global weather predictions in realtime and have my true-to-life recreation of the voyager doctor realize his sentience, THEN computers will be fast enough. Until the next killer app comes, of course.
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
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.
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.