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10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

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Re: 10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. It is not just thermals but also memory latency. If you have four cores and each has two register files you can get 8x the bandwidth at the same latency. 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…

>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. You talk as if there couldn't possibly be a benefit to an increase in speed without a corresponding increase in memory bandwidth. Whilst it wouldn't be an optimally efficient system, if we /could/ bump to…

Maybe you could do cryptography more quickly, but for general-purpose computing, and even most specialized tasks, memory latency and bandwidth are critical. For instance, look at the use of GDDR5 and HDM together with GPUs.

Most of the market is for things that are generalizable; maybe you could make some kind of hyper-DSP for millimeter wave base stations or something like that, but you have to spread out the development cost across a low number of units.

Re: 10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

#162
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. It is not just thermals but also memory latency. If you have four cores and each has two register files you can get 8x the bandwidth at the same latency. 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…

Any source on the clock rate jump? That's more than I had heard.

That is a long term target: definitely you can get transistors to switch that fast. 200GHz would not be a short-term target, but would it happen in 20 years? maybe.

Re: 10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

#164

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.

299,792,458 meters/second ÷ 3,000,000,000/second = 9.99 cm Just how close are you sitting to your monitor?

Perhaps I need glasses. :)

Re: 10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

#165

What ever happened to quantum computing, DNA computing, and optical computing? Are consumers ever going to see a general purpose computer based on any of those technologies on their desktops?

> Quantum computing

Still gradually in development, presumably coming someday. It's very difficult to get quantum systems of any real complexity to not decohere before they can do useful computation.

> DNA computing

DNA-based storage apparently exists in the lab and might exist someday: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/micros.... Current costs are something like $40 million/GB, so that'll have to come down "a bit". I don't know of anyone doing computation with DNA, biology seems too slow for that.

> Optical computing

It's very difficult to make light interact with other light (which is sine qua non for computation) except inside a material with electrons, where you get significant losses and there's no real advantage over just plain old transistors. Not likely to become a useful technology IMO.

Re: 10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

#166

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.

[deleted]

Re: 10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. It is not just thermals but also memory latency. If you have four cores and each has two register files you can get 8x the bandwidth at the same latency. 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…

>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. You talk as if there couldn't possibly be a benefit to an increase in speed without a corresponding increase in memory bandwidth. Whilst it wouldn't be an optimally efficient system, if we /could/ bump to…

There's a word for this: computational intensity, i.e. the ratio of useful compute operations per memory load in an app.

Are there are apps that have high computational intensity? Sure, matrix multiply is one of them. That's one of the reasons why dense linear algebra serves as the standard benchmark to determine the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

But even in HPC (high performance computing), many if not most apps actually have relatively low computational intensity (i.e. in the range of one or so compute operations per word of memory loaded). In this regime, it really doesn't make sense to grow compute out of proportion with memory bandwidth because you'll just be idling the processors.

And while I have no proof, I'd expect HPC applications to generally be more computationally intense than general consumer computing tasks. So I'd expect that computational intensity goes mostly down from here.

Re: 10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

#168
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really the experience of voice recognition people have? I can't get Siri to reliably create appointments... takes about 3 tries for the voice recognition to work correctly.

The "OK, Google" voice interface on Android, whatever it's brand name is, is amazing. Do try it out. It's able to understand me even with a lot of noise (street sounds). Also, there might be something wrong with the mic if you're using an external bluetooth mic?

While it is amazing in its comprehension, it feels incredibly slow. Even just saying "OK, Google" takes a bit too long for it to respond, while saying "OK, vijucat" would probably elicit an immediate response.

This is just my experience however on my Nexus 5 with very good wifi. Hopefully others are having a better experience, or there is a fix for the lag, because despite these problems, I use OK Google (Google Now?) quite often.

Re: 10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

#169
post #148

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…

The difficulty is thermal. Microwave stuff operates in linear region, extremely fast and often extremely inefficient. Logic stuff almost always operates in saturation mode where its very slow but efficient. Old timers will remember emitter coupled logic ECL which went to great efforts to operate in linear mode at amazing power use, like 100 MHz IBM mainframes needed water cooling back when 2 MHz Z80s were considered…

Funny you say that given I discovered ECL looking up ways to do fast CPU's on human-verifiable nodes. Might try to make some of them in the future.

Re: 10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

#170
post #117
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State of the art for dictation was probably Dragon Dictate / Naturally Speaking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking Windows had an API for basic command recognition, in late 90's giving the ability to navigate through telephony menus, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API#SAPI_1-4_...

Oh yeah, very practical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJ0CytAsec

That's a lot better than the results I get from Google voice today. Writing code isn't what it's optimised for though.
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