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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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 Hz.
From webopedia
(môrz lâ) (n.) The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future.
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
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.
Well, not unless he's able to leverage it, because it's impacting the story we have to tell.
Maybe the guy who promised him a 10GHz PC was counting in binary ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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.
I think it's going to take a lot of imagineering to fully appreciate the tectonics of a potential paridigm shift.
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.
Mods don't find marketspeak funny, apparently.
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.
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.
Thankfully we've got some proactive synergies and tremendous upside.
"More organs means more human." - Zim
... 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.
That was never the limit of copper. It was the limit of voiceband phone lines, which have artificially constrained bandwidth. Since voiceband is now transmitted digitally at 64Kbs, that's the hard theoretical limit, and 56K analog modems are already asymptotically close to that.
If you hook different equipment to the phone wires without the self-imposed bandwidth filters, then it's easy to get higher bandwidth. Ethernet and its predecessors has been pushing megabits or more over twisted pair for decades.
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/
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.
If we put our brains together synergistically, and I'm sure we can reach a solution.
For God's sake, please stop the business-speak!
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
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.