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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?"
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.
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...
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.
The CPU spends as much as 75% of its time idle because its waiting patiently for the memory to give it something to do. With Systems only delivering information at a max of 1 Ghz and processors going up to almost 4 times as fast... Studies also show that they could in term be able to squeeze 20 Ghz out of wires as long as 20 inches (and only by 2010 will we be able to achieve that), but that would only be sufficient for the 32 nanometer generation of microships (and we're quite ahead of that)... So i think the future resides in optical connections within the motherboard, allowing processors to finally... well... process ;-)
Maybe the guy who promised him a 10GHz PC was counting in binary ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I think it's going to take a lot of imagineering to fully appreciate the tectonics of a potential paridigm shift.
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.
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
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