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

Quick answer

[LiquidCoooled]

Run old software.

Its only new software thats sucking up all the extra processing power.

Remember back with really sluggish 33mhz 486s etc (and a lot lower) and thinking of the ultimate computer being a whole 50mhz.
Well now you got a computer thats over 10 times faster with practically infinate capacity.

Fire up that old operating system and run you original software, you will be in heaven!

Re:We don’t need more registers

[cnettel]

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.

What kind of algorithm are you imagining would benefit from 256 fields of non-vectorized data?

Of course, those registers could be used in larger things for everything that's worthy of a local variable, but as soon as you run into a stack operation you'll either only want to push a subset of the registers to the stack, or face a harder blow of memory access times by making each function call a 2048 byte write to memory.

Explicit encoding of parallelism, hints to branch prediction, and similar stuff, seems far more appropriate.

Again, few single functions in an imperative language have 256 separate variables, without involving arrays of data. Unless the register file is addressable by index from another register (basically turning it into a very small addressed memory, which is whta you try to avoid with registers), you have little use for 256 of them. Take for example a trivial string iteration algorithm, most of those registers would be completely useless. The same holds true for common graph algorithms.

Unbloated URL

[rylin]

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

Eliminate Bottlenecks

[Trolling4Columbine]

Chances are that you aren't often pushing your CPU to capacity. What I'd like to see is a better way to identify bottlenecks in my system. There's no sense pumping more power into a system if it's all going to be throttled by something like a slow hard drive.