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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?"
There is one law in computer programming that is even more certain than Moore's Law: Over time, the user is going to do less work for the computer and the computer is going to do more work for the user.
Remember back when users had to wait in line in front of a terminal to run their punchcards through the mainframe? Back then, human time was cheap and computer time expensive. Nowadays the user's time is paramount.
Multithreaded programming breaks this law: It is hard to do multithreaded programming- Humans just don't think that way very well. To do it in a way that an arbitrary program (i.e. not a ray tracer) can see consistent performance gains in a multi-CPU environment is almost PhD-level hard. Making single-threaded software is already a major undertaking and anyone thinking that, in general, they should start designing all their programs as fundamentally concurrent programs is going to fall behind their competition due to other factors (security, features, etc.).
Instead, the only way concurrent programming is going to play a major role for the majority of software, I believe, is at the compiler and OS levels: The OS and compiler designers are going to have to do their utmost to transform single-threaded software to perform optimally in a multi-CPU environment- These folks are going to have to take up the slack that the slow CPUs clockspeeds are causing in terms of limiting the speed of Software- Concurrent programming at the application-level is only going to play a minor role in this, in my opinion.
This was spewed from Intel in 2002:
"First, by switching to the Pentium 4 architecture, Intel can drastically boost the clock speed. The old server Xeon topped out at 1.4GHz. The new one debuts at 1.8GHz, 2GHz and 2.2GHz, and will eventually pass 10GHz, she said."
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-843879.html
I can't find the exact quote and article, but another Intel exec/rep stated that this goal would be achieved by 2006.
Well, it's 2005, the P4 has topped out at 3.6ghz and has been discontinued because Intel has determined that the P4 arcitecture is streached to the limit.
Bottom line is that we should be expecting a 10ghz processor soon because Intel brazenly stated that they would produce one. Whenever they do make these statements the AP drools over the story, stock prices jump and I'm sure investors get excited.
Instead, their next gen processor is a 2ghz Pentuim M dothan. Intel should be ashamed of themselves for lying to the public and should be investigated for inflating their stock value though fictional claims about their processor technology.