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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?"
We've found the limits of silicon and hard drives and they are being approached asyptotically. Relax...
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Multi-processing is the way to go. We need to do that to help heat dissipation...
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
It was just an observed trend. The trend is breaking, as far as retail availability, and thus we are not seeing our 10GHz rigs. (I believe that Moore's law is still trending fine in the labs.)
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.
...I cannae change the laws'a'physics!
According to most predictions we were meant to be enjoying lives of leisure by this point - working a 5-hour week in the paperless office, and driving to work in our hovercars.
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...
since the mid 90s thats all I have built - they really do extend the time before you feel compelled to upgrade. Sure there are not that many apps that run threads on each CPU. But to me a large part of it is that I run many applications simultaneously. With 2 CPU's I rarely get any sluggish feel. And if one app is being especially hoggish I can set it to run on one cpu and flip another important app to the other cpu.
This time around I also sprung for a hardware raid card and set up a 10 array. That has helped quite a bit with system responsiveness.
I've also turned off as much eye candy as possible. After a couple days its really not missed and things are much snappier.
yeah it would be great if I could run out and get some 10GHz chips to fry a few eggs on, but I think my dual MP2200's still have a bit of life in them.
flying car.
Where else would it be?
#SickNotWeak
Why the size restraints on processors? Could a processor be made twice as fast if it could be made twice the size? When we hit the limit on how small transistors can be made, could processors continue to increase in speed by making them larger? I see no need why computers need to keep a processor size to two inches square.
Moore's law has nothing to do with processor frequency. It says that semi-conductor capacity doubles every 18 monthsm, not frequency. (With the corollary that there is no appreciable change in price). As we all know, semi-conductor capacity is roughly proportional to speed, so saying processor speeds double every 18 months is not quite wrong, just a little inaccurate. On the other hand, saying that we're not seeing 10 ghz processors, so Moore's law is broken is wrong.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Ramping up clock speeds is hitting some serious limitations as far as increasing the work done by a machine is concerned. There are lots of ways to get work done faster. They are just harder to market without some good, popular, and independent benchmarking standards. At some point engine manufacturers realized that increasing the cubic centimeters of displacement in an engine was not the best way to make it faster or more powerful. Now most car reviews include horsepower. Clock speed is analogous to CCs.
Judging from these pictures of the Intel retail boxed heatsink for the Pentium 4 560J (3.6 GHz), by the time we get 10 GHz PCs, the hovercar problem will take care of itself.
Maybe the guy who promised him a 10GHz PC was counting in binary ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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!
Whenever the government "picks winners" rather than letting nature pick winners, the technologists and therefore technology loses.
(Now that Cray is dead, according to the supercomputing FAQ, "The CCC intellectual property was purchased for a mere $250 thousand by Dasu, LLC - a corporation set up and (AFAIK) wholly owned by Mr. Hub Finkelstein, a Texas oilman. He's owned this stuff for five years and hasn't done anything with it.")
Secondly, as I've discussed before both operating system and database programming are awaiting the development of relations, most likely via the predicate calculus, as a foundation for software. Both are essentially parallel processing foundations for software.
This feeds into quantum computing quite nicely as well, as relations are not just inherently parallel, but are parallel in such a way that they precisely model quantum software.
Seastead this.
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.
And to think, that apple's CPUs are nearly at the same 'number speed' in the mhz race now!
Who would'a ever thought to see that happen?
Tibbon
tibbon.com
authoring a DVD in less than an 4 hours from the dv-avi source?
my own CGI production in my lifetime?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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.
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..?
According to Microsoft, an average Longhorn system will need to have a 4-6GHz CPU. But if when Longhorn arrives, 4GHz CPUs are high-end parts and 6GHz CPUs don't exist, well...I don't predict good things for Microsoft. Longhorn in 2007, anyone? Or maybe 2008...
... and will always be! ;-) I think I first read this qoute sometimes in late 80s/early 90s, and it is still true. You know why? Ever looked at power dissipation specks of even the simplest GaAs chips? You would not want to build a processor out of those, Cray tried with Cray 4 and failed... ;-(
;-)
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. IBM would be a good candidate for this, but they got burned on superconductor computer project back in 80s and would not touch it with 10 foot pole now, though both logic and fab has changed dramatically since then.
Disclosure: on my day job I do design III-V chips, and I used to design superconductor chips up until recently, now trying to push that technology forward is more of a night job for me...
Paul B.
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.
### 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.
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.
If you crave the challenge of making tight, efficient code, sometimes with very little under you but the bare chip itself, then embedded systems might be the place for you.
cue the grumpy old man voice: "Why back in my day, we didn't have 64-bit multi-core chips with gigabytes of memory to waste, no sir, we had to write in assembly code for 8-bit processors, and WE LOVED IT!"
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
Supposing that you need that first sale of your system to a customer, and when they demo your software, they see it's so slow that they dismiss it and buy the competitor's product. You don't have a second chance. This actually happened with a company I know of. The company pretty much went tits up because the architect neglected performance.
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?
I don't necessarily need to write the sort algorithm, but I need to be concerned with the effect of using the various algorthms on my system and select the corrrect one accordingly.
Again, that company that failed went with using a standard library for some functionality in the product instead of rolling their own and this had disasterous results. After the customer complained about performance, they found that they'ld need to completely redesign a significant portion of the product to correct the problem. It wasn't a two or three day fix. The fix would have taken 1-2 months. Try eating that cost when you're a small company.
Analogue lines aren't like DS-0 lines, which have a seperate control channel, the control is "bit robbed" from the signal. They take out 8kbps for signaling, giving 56k effective for encoding. That's why with ISDN there is talk of B and D channels. For BRI ISDN you get 2 64k (DS-0) B (bearer) channels that actually carry the signal. There is then a 16k D (data) channel that carries the information on how to route the B channels.
That's also why IDSL is 144k. The total bandwidth of an ISDN line is 144k, but 16k is used for circut switching data. DSL is point-to-point, so that's unnecessary and the D channel's bandwidth can be used for signal.
So 56k is as good as it will ever get for single analogue modems. I suppose, in theory, this could be changed in the future, I suppose, but I find that rather unlikely given that any new technology is likely to be digital end to end.
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.
For God's sake, please stop the business-speak!
But then how are we supposed to leverage our synergies going forward to create a win-win situation? You are generating negative ROI in this incumbent conversation, and have become a cromulent addition to the team. You will be capsized^W rightsized immediately.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.