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The Future of Intel Processors
madison writes to mention coverage at ZDNet on the future of Intel technology. Multicore chips are their focus for the future, and researchers at the company are working on methods to adapt them for specific uses. The article cites an example were the majority of the cores are x86, with some accelerators and embedded graphics cores added on for added functionality. "Intel is also tinkering with ways to let multicore chips share caches, pools of memory embedded in processors for rapid data access. Cores on many dual- and quad-core chips on the market today share caches, but it's a somewhat manageable problem. "When you get to eight and 16 cores, it can get pretty complicated," Bautista said. The technology would prioritize operations. Early indications show that improved cache management could improve overall chip performance by 10 percent to 20 percent, according to Intel." madison also writes, "In another development news Intel has updated its Itanium roadmap to include a new chip dubbed 'Kittson' to follow the release of Poulson. That chip will be based on a new microarchitecture that provides higher levels of parallelism."
I think Cell's taught us two important things about heterogeneous multicore:
:) Buy stock in gcc...
1. It's fairly hard to develop for.
2. It's bloody fast.
Looks like Intel's gonna be running with it some; that's good news for anyone making a living selling compilers!
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While multicores, obviously, have their use, the future belongs to CPUs with massive internal implicit parallelism, IMHO.
What I really want is a dialogue with Intel engineers about this piece of Intel-themed news. Why can't you add something like that to the site? You could call it something like Opinions With Intel or Intel And Opinions or Center for Intel. No that's not quite right.
So we can can have comments in parallel.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I hate to break it to ya, but in a low-level language like C, doing proper bounds checks and data sanitization required for security does not help performance (although it doesn't harm it much either, and should of course always be done)
There is a lot of bloated code out there, but the bad news for people who always post "just write better code!" is that the truly processor-intensive stuff (like image processing, 3D games) is already pretty well optimized to take advantage of modern hardware.
There's also the definition of what "good code" actually is. I could write a parallelized sort algorithm that would be nowhere near as fast as a decent quicksort on modern hardware. However, on hardware from 10 years from now with a big number of cores, the parallelized algorithm would end up being faster. So which one is the 'good' code?
As usual, real programming problems in the real world are too complex to be solved by 1-line Slashdot memes.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
It seems that Intel very rarely mentions clock speed in any of their roadmap briefings. The clock speed increases over the last five years or so have been pretty minimal. Moore's law talks about the rate transistor density increases. But, clock speed has followed a similar curve until recently. The last 4-5 years has to be the longest plateau in the history of the industry.
Yes, I know they changed to a new architecture that put less emphasis on raw clock speed. But, given that more efficient architecture, clock speed increases are still going to be a major benefit.
So, what's the story? Has the industry hit a wall? How long will it take to get back to above 3GHz for a mainstream processor, or even to the 4GHz levels that the old Pentium IVs were pushing.
Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the power efficiencies of the new chips. For my primary purposes (laptop, HTPC) the new chips are a godsend. And, the thought of specialized "accelerator" cores is fantastic (a video decoder core for MPEG2 & H.264, please). But, doing that same thing at 4GHz is even more compelling (of course, with the speedstep++ stuff to shut down cores when not needed, and throttle back to low GHz to save power).
What we really need is for software to catch up. Luckily some programs like Premiere, Photoshop have supported multiple CPU's for a while now. But games, etc can really benefit from this. Just stick AI on 1 core, terrain on another, etc etc.
I've found that improved cash management does wonders for me, like allowing me to buy things like new processors.
This guy's the limit!
Where will all the CPU time go on desktops with these highly parallel processors?
I'd much rather they focussed on making chips more energy efficient than faster. At the moment barring a few high end applications most of the cpu power on the majority of current processors is largely unused.
I dream of the day when my gaming computer doesn't need any active cooling, or heat sinks the size of houses. Focussing on efficiency would also force developers to write better code, honestly its unbelievable how badly some programs run and how resource intensive they are for what they do.
For some reason javascript is slow on all browsers. I believe there is a W3C spec that mandates it.