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The Gigahertz Race is Back On
An anonymous reader writes "When CPU manufacturers ran up against the power wall in their designs, they announced that 'the Gigahertz race is over; future products will run at slower clock speeds and gain performance through the use of multiple cores and other techniques that won't improve single-threaded application performance.' Well, it seems that the gigahertz race is back on — a CNET story talks about how AMD has boosted the speed of their new Opterons to 3GHz. Of course, the new chips also consume better than 20% more power than their last batch. 'The 2222 SE, for dual-processor systems, costs $873 in quantities of 1,000, according to the Web site, and the 8222 SE, for systems with four or eight processors costs $2,149 for quantities of 1,000. For comparison, the 2.8GHz 2220 SE and 8220 SE cost $698 and $1,514 in that quantity. AMD spokesman Phil Hughes confirmed that the company has begun shipping the new chips. The company will officially launch the products Monday, he said.'"
This reminds me of the sign at the local breakfast shop (paraphrased): "Use coffee: do stupid things faster".
Yeah, this is cool, no doubt. How many users actually *use* how much power they already have? I use a lot, but it's mostly dependent on the graphics card.
No sane person actually believed that the gigahurtz race was over. But who cares about it anyway, just more power for a little faster operation.
I muchly prefer a fanless processor.
I was kind of hoping the gigahertz race would end so Microsoft would have to stop making each version of Windows slower than the last.
So take a top end 3GHz model and underclo it and reduce its voltage. You still get good performance, with lower power consumption.
^_^
Don't do THAT please. This ISN'T a comic BOOK. ;)
You'd be surprised how much more _can_ be made with a CPU.
E.g., sure, we like to use the stereotypical old mom as an example of someone who only sends emails to the kids and old friends. Unfortunately it's false. It was true in the 90's, but now digital cameras are everywhere and image manipulation software is very affordable. And so are the computers which can do it. You'd be suprised the kind of heavy-duty image processing mom does on hundreds of pictures of squirrels and geese and whatever was in the park on that day.
And _video_ processing isn't too far out of reach either. It's a logical next step too: if you're taking pictures, why not short movies? Picture doing the same image processing on some thousands of frames in a movie instead of one still pictures.
E.g., software development. Try building a large project on an old 800 MHz slot-A Athlon, with all optimizations on, and then tell me I don't need a faster CPU. Plus, nowadays IDEs aren't just dumb editors with a "compile" option in the menus any more. They compile and cross-reference classes all the time as you type.
E.g., games, since you mention the graphics card. Yeah, ok, at the moment most games are just a glorified graphics engine, and mostly just use the CPU to pump the triangles to the graphics card. Well that's a pretty poor model, and the novelty of graphics alone is wearing off fast.
How about physics? They're just coming into fashion, and fast. Yeah, we make do at the moment with piss-poor approximations, like Oblivion's bump-into-a-table-and-watch-plates-fly-off-superso nic engine. There's no reason we couldn't do better.
How about AI? Already in X2 and X3 (the space sim games) it doesn't only simulate the enemies around you, but also what happens in the sectors where your automated trade or patrol ships are. I want to see that in more games.
Or how about giving good AI to city/empire building games? Tropico already simulated up to 1000 little people in your city, going around their daily lives, making friends, satisfying their needs, etc. Not just doing a dumb loop, like in Pharaoh or Caesar 3, but genuinely trying to solve the problem of satisfying their biggest need at the moment: e.g., if they're hungry, they go buy food (trekking across the whole island if needed), if they're sick, they go to a doctor, etc. I'd like to see more of that, and more complex at that.
Or let's have that in RPGs, for that matter. Oblivion for example made a big fuss about how smart and realistic their AI is... and it wasn't. But the hype it generated does show that people care about that kind of thing. So how about having games with _big_ cities, not just 4-5 houses, but cities with 1000-2000 inhabitants, which are actually smart. Let's have not just a "fame" and "infamy" rating, let's have people who actually have a graph of aquaintances and friends, and actually gradually spread the rumours. (I.e., you're not just the guy with 2 points infamy, but it's a question of which of your bad deeds did this particular NPC hear about.) Let's not have omniscient guards that teleport, but actually have witnesses calculate a path and run to inform the guards, and lead them to the crime. Etc.
Or how about procedurally generated content? The idea of creating whole cities, quests and whatnot procedurally isn't a new one, but unfortunately it tends to create boring repetition at the moment. (See Daggerfall or Morrowind.) How about an AI complex enough to generate reasonably interesting stuff. E.g., not just recombine blocks, but come up with a genuinely original fortress from the ground up, based on some constraints. E.g., how about generating whole story arcs? It's not impossible, it's just very hard.
And if you need to ask "why?", let's just say: non-linear stories. Currently if you want, for example, to play a light side and a dark side, someone has to code two different arcs, although most players will only see one or the other. If you add more points and ways you can branch the story (e.g.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
AMD64 has 16 registers
AMD seems to be working on putting a GPU in ther CPU
Memory used to be managed by a dedicated chip -- the northbridge. But AMD moved it into the CPU because it was faster that way.
The APIC? But anyway, the slow part of interrupt handling is done in the OS kernel, which runs on the CPU. So I'm not sure how much a chip would help there.
I'm not an expert, but my guess is that because computers are all-purpose devices. Specialized hardware can accelerate something like encryption or audio mixing, but there doesn't seem to be all that much of that sort of thing that's still worth accelerating. Most people don't need to encrypt the huge amounts of data that would make a dedicated accelerator make much of a difference. Notice also how now almost nobody buys sound cards anymore, because you can just mix sound in hardware.
Funny, Intel was chumped by AMD just like this a couple of years ago, why did AMD let themselves get tagged back? Intel woke up in a major way. Can AMD? Doesn't look too good...
Low thermal dissipation is a much more prevalent theme for AMD than it is for Intel, especially outside of the notebook sector. Yes, Intel has some 1.06 and 1.20 GHz Core 2 Duo ULVs for laptops and those have a 10-watt or so thermal dissipation while AMD's lowest-TDP mobile chips rate in at 25 watts (Turion 64 MT/Sempron.) Intel also has the single-core Core Solo series at 1.06-1.33 GHz that dissipates 5.5 watts. However, those chips are very rarely seen in any notebooks larger than a 12" screen size. You'd be much more likely to see a 31-watt Core Duo or 34-watt Core 2 Duo sitting in an average laptop than a 10-watt C2D ULV. AMD's Turion X2s have similar TDPs, ranging from 31 to 35 watts. All of the processors have similar frequency and voltage scaling mechanisms and battery life is roughly similar.
For desktops, most of Intel's newer Core 2 Duo processors have an average thermal dissipation of 65 watts. The fastest Core 2 Duo, the 2.93 GHz X6800, has a 75-watt average TDP. The quad-core chips range from 105 watts for the 2.40 GHz Q6600 to the 130-watt QX6700. These chips have a very reduced version of the SpeedStep that Intel puts in its laptop chips. The lowest core speed of the 800 MHz FSB chips is 1.20 GHz and 1.6 GHz for the 1066 MHz FSB chips. AMD's current new desktop processors start from a maximum thermal dissipation of 35 watts for the single-core Sempron EE and go up to 45 watts for the Athlon 64 single-cores (Lima), 65 watts for the Athlon 64 X2 models from the 3600+ to the 5200+, 89 watts for the 5400+ and 5600+, and 125 watts for the X2 6000+ and FX-70 series. The AMD chips all clock down to 1 GHz at idle. AMD also rates the chips on their absolute maximum thermal dissipation rather than an average thermal dissipation like Intel does, so a 65 watt AMD chip will usually end up drawing less power than an Intel 65-watt chip. The AMD chips also draw significantly less power at idle due to their lower clock speed.
The scenario is much the same for servers. AMD has their High Efficieny line of dual-core chips that draw 68 watts, the normal line that draws 95 watts, and the SE line that draws 125 watts. Intel has a few low-voltage Xeons, but those are very uncommon and pretty much limited to blade server vendors. AMD sells its Opteron HEs through a wide range of vendors.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Yeah, and while we're complaining, my $1.5 million Bugatti Veyron gets under 3mpg at full throttle when I expect BETTER DESIGN that uses LESS GAS when we're trying to REDUCE fossil fuel consumption. I can tell you why, BAD DESIGNERS who need to get off their asses and give me MORE HORSEPOWER with LESS FUEL or talk to the hand.
Bumping the speed from 2.5Ghz to 3Ghz is hardly a return to the Ghz race. This stuff is still based on cold war technology and the limit of cold war technology has been reached. They need a serious breakthrough in interconnect speeds now.
Here you are.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
After reading the article and many of the responses here on Slashdot I think many of the readers on here are a little off base on what the issues are to many of the problems you proposed that increased CPU performance might solve.
I read many comments about graphic editing. Being that hardly a day goes by where I don't do some graphic editing I think I am qualified to respond to this. The synergy lab at my University, where I am pursuing my Masters in Computer Science, has a Dual Power Mac with 2 Intel dual core 2.66 Ghz CPUs but only has 1 Gigabyte of RAM. At home I have a Dual Power Mac G4 with 2 800 Mhz CPU. I am not trying to argue here that the IBM 970 processors are superior to the Intel, though they may well be (lol), but I have 4 Gigabytes of RAM in my home system. I am way more productive working on my home system due to the increased memory it has. Graphic editing by nature is a RAM intensive process. If I were going to buy a new system that would be dedicated to graphic editing I would first spend my budgeted amount of money on making sure the system had the maximum amount of RAM (16 Gigabytes currently) before I gave any thought to the processor(s) for such a system.
Also, many people mentioned either directly or indirectly processes that simulate AI. I make a point of saying "simulate" because our society has yet to produce any software that can come close to claiming to contain any AI. This is not a problem that can be solved by increased CPU or RAM or any other system resource. The #1 problem that plagues any currently developed program in their attempts to simulate AI is that our society has not developed a strong enough knowledge base of intelligence itself to understand how to write code that gives any acceptable level of simulation of it. If Intel where to release a 500 THz CPU tomorrow there would be no significant increase in real or simulated AI. Though, with enough CPU speed and RAM it might be possible one day to create a tree (data structure) that contains all the possible moves for a game of chess which would allow a computer to play a perfect game of chess this would not be an application of AI, although at one time people believed that chess was an application of AI, we have now realized that this is not the case and if a computer did have the complete tree for the game of chess, a significant accomplishment, it would simply be an application of brute force. I have yet to see any application of AI (again real or simulated) that faced against a human opponent can compete at a level that would challenge the human. Again, this is due to basic lack of understanding and programming skill rather than a lack of processing power. IMHO, that someday man may gain enough understanding and programming skill to not only simulate but actually program AI. When I think of this possibility I imagine it will be one of those eureka moments rather than a slow progression based upon our current study of AI. At best we are currently guessing and hoping that we might stumble on something than can simulate AI and even with all the computing power available in the world I do not believe we would be any further along.
If anything an increase in hardware performance be it CPU, RAM, or whatnot that increase is generally proceeded by more and more inefficient code. Why make your code more efficient when the lack of performance in your programs can easily be overcome by ever increasing system resources?
I remember when one had to upgrade their computer each year to be able to continue to have a viable system. Long gone are those days. I have had my primary system for nearly 7 years now. I will need to upgrade soon but not because my system is lacking in hardware performance but because of the scenario I described above in which programmers continue to use system hardware as a crutch. If some physical limitation were to present itself that prevented the creation of faster CPUs by either increased clock cycles or additional cores then programmers would adapt and we would cont
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...