The Quest for More Processing Power

Hack Jandy writes "AnandTech has a very thorough, but not overly technical, article detailing CPU scaling over the last decade or so. The author goes into specific details on how CPUs have overcome limitations of die size, instruction size and power to design the next generation of chips. Part I, published today, talks specifically about the limitations of multiple cores and multiple threads on processors."

Comments

Re:We don’t need more “power”

[LiquidCoooled]

Didn't the powerpc have something approaching this.
I remember the old motorola 68000 range having 16 32bit regs for general coding, and one of the prime benefits of the ppc was the vastly greater registry capacity.

I stopped coding assembler when I moved to x86 - what a horrible cludge of a stack stack biased platform it is.

Unbloated URL

[rylin]

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2343.
Same article without 90% of the ad-bloat.

Re:We don’t need more registers

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Ok, classic x86 is cramped and the CPU does a lot of register renaming to get around it. I don't agree that more registers would actually do that much good.

It does. Take a look at x86-64. The 98% reason 64 bit x86 code is faster when you are using less than 4 gigs of RAM is the fact it has double the registers. With the same number of registers, 64 bit code normally slows things down measurably because the pointer size doubled. The instruction word length doesn't change.

256 registers goes a bit far unless half of them are predication bits.

Re:Eliminate Bottlenecks

[Ironsides]

Most bottelnecks are already known. Here is a breakdown of access time when you are running at processor speeds:

L1 & L2 Cache: Almost instantanious, Picoosecond resonse time
L3 and higher Cache: A bit slower, but still pretty quick, Nano resonse time
Main memmory: Go do something else while waiting for this, Nano/Microsecond resonse time

Hard Drive: Go to lunch and come back, Milisecond resonse time

Re:just a thought

[ChrisMaple]

Peltiers have been used, but they are expensive, inefficient, and not very useful at the high power densities of a P4.

Leakage is not available as a power source. Leakage is turned into heat in that exact location where the leakage occurs.