41–50 of 131 posts
Stockpiling chips so partners can test them later? If the point is to validate designs, wouldn't you want to do the testing before the stockpiling?
It's not so the partner can test/validate the cpu, it's so the partners can test/validate their designs using the cpu. i.e. It's hard to test/validate a laptop design if no CPUs exist that work with it.
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My first thought is that they should increase the number of cores in a CPU as much as possible. Having a single CPU with hundreds of cores would be really useful. Of course, they also have to make advances on cooling technology. The types of applications that I have in mind are rendering, AI, and gaming. The types of games that would benefit greatly from such CPU are the ones that make heavy use of a Physics Engine.
I actually think along similar lines but at a higher level of abstraction. I think we'll have to start moving towards multiple complete computer systems, each with their own internal busses, memory, etc., that operate as a unified whole. A bit like massively parallel systems do.
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Is it roughly accurate to say that if your computing area operates at 10x the speed, you can do 10 cores worth of computing work with one core? That would free up a lot of die area for other things, though I don't know how to guess how much that extra space would improve the other bits. I'd kind of figure that such a technology would also speed up the RAM, but I suppose that's not true either if the underlying storag…
In CMOS the killer is that they consume power when switching (power ends up being a square of switching frequency). So if you switched. 10x, you'd have to somehow dissipate 100x the power. Your core might be small, but the industrial-sized refrigerator needed to cool it suddenly isn't.
What are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is it an existential wall?
My impression is that they know moore's gravy train is over and they're scrambling to figure out new tricks to allow them to sell a new generation of processors every year. Personally, while I'm a little disappointed that processors 20 years from now might not be 4+ orders of magnitude faster than the one I have now, I wouldn't mind being able to buy a computer and not have to worry about upgrading it for 10 years (I…
20 years ago we had Pentium 3 500MHz, 2 FLOPs/cycle, 1 GFlops.
GPU of my desktop PC computes 11 TFlops, that's 4+ orders of magnitude faster.
For CPUs alone it's indeed less impressive, $500 for that P3 inflated to $760, the comparable modern CPU is Threadripper 2920X, 16 flops/cycle * 12 cores * 3.5 GHz = 672 GFlops.
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My impression is that they know moore's gravy train is over and they're scrambling to figure out new tricks to allow them to sell a new generation of processors every year. Personally, while I'm a little disappointed that processors 20 years from now might not be 4+ orders of magnitude faster than the one I have now, I wouldn't mind being able to buy a computer and not have to worry about upgrading it for 10 years (I…
Processors are not that fast yet, but computers as a whole are. 20 years ago we had Pentium 3 500MHz, 2 FLOPs/cycle, 1 GFlops. GPU of my desktop PC computes 11 TFlops, that's 4+ orders of magnitude faster. For CPUs alone it's indeed less impressive, $500 for that P3 inflated to $760, the comparable modern CPU is Threadripper 2920X, 16 flops/cycle * 12 cores * 3.5 GHz = 672 GFlops.
But they’re much lower quality (less flexible) FLOPs. If you don’t have much data parallelism or heavy conditional logic for each datum, you’re not going to come close to 11 teraflops.
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New? Using epoxy to make batteries hard to replace and other tweaks to make other unreliable parts hard to replace. Popular recent choices are keyboards and backlights.
Not everyone uses Macbooks. There are plenty of laptops with easily replaceable batteries and sane keyboards. Not even talking about real computers, where you can replace everything without any tools.
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Processors are not that fast yet, but computers as a whole are. 20 years ago we had Pentium 3 500MHz, 2 FLOPs/cycle, 1 GFlops. GPU of my desktop PC computes 11 TFlops, that's 4+ orders of magnitude faster. For CPUs alone it's indeed less impressive, $500 for that P3 inflated to $760, the comparable modern CPU is Threadripper 2920X, 16 flops/cycle * 12 cores * 3.5 GHz = 672 GFlops.
> GPU of my desktop PC computes 11 TFlops, that's 4+ orders of magnitude faster. But they’re much lower quality (less flexible) FLOPs. If you don’t have much data parallelism or heavy conditional logic for each datum, you’re not going to come close to 11 teraflops.
Update: also, for other tasks, GPU flops are of higher quality than CPU.
VRAM bandwidth is ridiculous, much higher than system RAM, computations that are bound by RAM bandwidth will be much faster.
GPUs mask RAM latency with hardware multithreading, if your code is parallel and needs to access large amount of data randomly, a GPU will saturate these flops, a CPU will sleep most of the time waiting for data to arrive.
Semiaccurate claims that this is entirely Intel marketing fluff, and that in reality Intel can't get 10nm yield up to useful levels, now or ever. (that's a tl;dr for https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/04/25/leaked-roadmap-shows... )
My understanding is that Intel is doing OK with smaller die size 10nm (Cannon Lake-U / Ice Lake-U) for Ultrabooks. But for bigger dies such as HEDT or server CPUs, the Ice Lake SP is still pretty much in the air with Intel's vague timeline of "sooner than expected end of 2020" claim.
Ice Lake-U sounds better on paper - at the very least it's a 4C die.
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My impression is that they know moore's gravy train is over and they're scrambling to figure out new tricks to allow them to sell a new generation of processors every year. Personally, while I'm a little disappointed that processors 20 years from now might not be 4+ orders of magnitude faster than the one I have now, I wouldn't mind being able to buy a computer and not have to worry about upgrading it for 10 years (I…
> I wouldn't mind being able to buy a computer and not have to worry about upgrading it for 10 years (I think we're pretty close to this point already). Depending on your needs, we're been there for at least 10 years. I don't expect to have to upgrade (not counting increasing memory or storage as "ugrading") or replace any of the systems I own right now until they're over 10 years old. About half of my current machin…
It seems unlikely that hardware improvements have stalled out right at the point where the performance level was just good enough.