131–140 of 180 posts
Just to give a little intuition for exactly how fast your CPU runs (assuming ~3 GHz), a single cycle takes about as much time as it takes a photon to travel from your monitor to your eyeball.
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The general term for that is Dark Silicon [1]. It helps a little and as, others have pointed out, Intel CPUs already have a similar feature called "Turbo Boost." NVIDIA processors also have a similar "GPU Boost" feature. But I don't know if that can enable a single core to run at 10GHz. Shutting off other cores does not lower the local power density / thermal dissipation of the single core at 10GHz. You still have to…
Right, but the suggestion is that when "one core" is running, you switch around which core it is that's actually hot, so they're taking turns generating the heat. Obviously there's some cost there in sharing registers, cache, etc, but it's an interesting notion.
I've always wondered why the need for ghz, isn't mips what you're looking for. wouldn't a 50mhz 1000 core cpu do well with decent parallelism in a compiler? how many cycles does the average method/function/procedure need anyway?
If 90% of your runtime can be done in parallel, you still have to wait for that last 10%. You can hit this limit with 10 cores (1 processing the 10% that's serial, the other 9 processing the 90% in parallel). If you throw 1000 cores at the problem, you'll have 999 cores processing the 90% in parallel, each performing 0.09% of the workload, but you'll still have 1 core doing the 10% that's serial. Those 999 cores will be idle for 99% of the time, waiting for that last core to finish.
The counter-argument is Gustafson's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law
This says that people don't choose a particular task, then wait for a computer to do it. Instead, the choice of which task to perform depends on what the computer can manage. Hence the user of a 1000 core machine will choose to do different tasks than the user of a 10 core machine, or a 1 core machine.
Whilst Gustafson's Law is clear from experience (a PlayStation 4 isn't used to run Pacman really fast), Amdahl's Law is the one that's relevant for compilers: a "sufficiently smart compiler" can alter your code in all sorts of ways, but the resulting executable must still perform the same task (otherwise it's a bug!).
There might be an approach based on e.g. writing an abstract specification and deriving a program which is suitable for the given hardware, but that's a long way off (for non-trivial tasks, at least).
Over a decade later, even overclockers haven't managed to reach 10GHz --- but some have come close: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fx-8150-overclock-9ghz-... At 10GHz, light travels approximately 3cm between each period of the clock. Note that transistors which operate above 10GHz are not rare and used in microwave applications; as I understand it, the difficulty is in creating logic circuits with them and at a…
> 10GHz, light travels approximately 3cm between each period of the clock Light doesn't change speed, so this statement confuses me.
Article says: Obviously this 8 – 10GHz clock range would be based on Intel’s 0.07-micron process that is forecasted to debut in 2005. These processors will run at less than 1 volt, 0.85v being the current estimate. Intel introduced a 65 nm (0.065 micron) process in 2006. The "Cedar Mill" Pentium 4 processor ran at 3.6 GHz at a whopping 1.3V although a small double-pumped part of the processor ran at 7.2 GHz. It could…
> Although the transistors can technically run at 9 GHz, the resulting power density is very difficult to cool. But nowadays we have processors with multiple cores, where sometimes you need only 1 core (and it needs to be fast). So would it be an idea to increase clock frequency for those cores, but multiplex them quickly to allow them to cool?
That 10GHz talk was a lie on the part of Intel to intimidate people away from AMD, not only would a 10GHZ P4 melt down, but it would be stalled all the time from memory latency. So many things did not work that it was not an honest mistake.
Today there is talk of a big clock rate bump (to 200 GHZ or so) if they go to a different semiconductor, but at that point you probably need a fiber optic or terahertz wave link to memory to keep the pipeline full.
Over a decade later, even overclockers haven't managed to reach 10GHz --- but some have come close: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fx-8150-overclock-9ghz-... At 10GHz, light travels approximately 3cm between each period of the clock. Note that transistors which operate above 10GHz are not rare and used in microwave applications; as I understand it, the difficulty is in creating logic circuits with them and at a…
> 10GHz, light travels approximately 3cm between each period of the clock Light doesn't change speed, so this statement confuses me.
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Haven't we reached the point of diminishing returns regarding processor speed? I believe this to be true for the consumer market.
If you only use your computer for web browsing, then sure. But the consumer market is more than just this. Several popular "consumer" applications, such as gaming and photo/video editing, continue to see benefit from increases in CPU performance, and single-core performance (what most people actually want when they ask for higher clock speeds), continues to be very relevant to this day. Not all workloads are easily p…
Lots of (most?) software development typically charges ahead without much regard to resource usage, until performance becomes a problem; then things are optimised until performance is no longer a problem, and the charge resumes. This results in software with performance which is just about acceptable, regardless of what resources are available. It was the case in 2000, it is the case now, and it would be the case if we had 50GHz machines.
This is the case for tasks where the main bottleneck is 'has anybody bothered to implement this yet?'; I'd say your examples of gaming and video editing are tasks where performance is a major part of the bottleneck. Arguably, Trello didn't exist in the 90s because nobody had bothered to make it yet; Skyrim didn't exist in the 90s because the machines weren't up to it.
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I certainly don't remember anything of usable quality being available to end-users. My Windows 98 machine could barely play 360p videos and didn't even have a camera. The voice recognition that I do remember trying was of very low accuracy. Do you remember any specifics of where & how exactly these features were available?
We had people in the office in the late 90s with repetitive stress issues who were using Dragon NaturallySpeaking pretty effectively.
Over a decade later, even overclockers haven't managed to reach 10GHz --- but some have come close: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fx-8150-overclock-9ghz-... At 10GHz, light travels approximately 3cm between each period of the clock. Note that transistors which operate above 10GHz are not rare and used in microwave applications; as I understand it, the difficulty is in creating logic circuits with them and at a…
> 10GHz, light travels approximately 3cm between each period of the clock Light doesn't change speed, so this statement confuses me.