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New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#221

Post by Jweb_Guru »

ipsum2 wrote: post #154
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you noticed, but Moore's Law died quite awhile ago now.

Moore's law is fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#/media/File:Moore'...

Moore's Law was originally about the number of transistors per unit area and that has absolutely stalled. They are comparing 72 and 64 core processors to single core ones to try to make the claim that "transistors per chip" are doubling in accordance with Moore's Law (which they still aren't--you can plot a line through and see that we are falling short of linear on a log scale). Are you really arguing that simply making microprocessors larger, ignoring cost and density, is an improvement in processing power (especially for the average end user, who is on a machine with only a handful of cores)?

Look at the actual transistor sizes. In 2009 we were at 32 nm. We're now in 2021, so if transistor sizes had kept halving every two years we would be at 0.5 nm. Clearly, we are not anywhere close to that--we're off by a factor of 10, and that's only with the very latest and greatest manufacturing processes that almost no consumer chips use (not to mention that the 5nm process used by AMD is not the same as a 5nm process used by Intel). As the article itself notes:

> Microprocessor architects report that semiconductor advancement has slowed industry-wide since around 2010, below the pace predicted by Moore's law.

Of course transistor companies are happy to claim that they are secretly keeping pace, but in terms of commercially available microprocessors it is unquestionably false. Anyone using the "doubling every two years" approximation to decide how much more computing power is available now than 10 years ago, or how much more will be available 10 years in the future, is not going to arrive at correct figures.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#222

Post by grkvlt »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #221
ipsum2 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moore's law is fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#/media/File:Moore'...

Moore's Law was originally about the number of transistors per unit area and that has absolutely stalled. They are comparing 72 and 64 core processors to single core ones to try to make the claim that "transistors per chip" are doubling in accordance with Moore's Law (which they still aren't--you can plot a line through and see that we are falling short of linear on a log scale). Are you really arguing that simply ma…

Moore's law was stated originally as the doublinkd of the number of transistors per integrated circuit per year, later modified by him to a doublingevery two years. Reading the article where he first proposed the rule (cited in the wikipedia article linked in parent) this confirms that definition, as opposed to transistors per unit area or other measures.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#223

Post by beefok »

freeqaz wrote: post #32
the8472 wrote: post #18

> We use a logic primitive called the adiabatic quantum-flux-parametron (AQFP), which has a switching energy of 1.4 zJ per JJ when driven by a four-phase 5-GHz sinusoidal ac-clockat 4.2 K. The landauer limit at 4.2K is 4.019×10^-23 J (joules). So this is only a factor of 38x away from the landauer limit.

Mind expanding on this a bit more? What is that that limit and how does it relate to the clock speed?

This book goes into some great detail about this. :) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZLS3TU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... I will always recommend it!

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#224

Post by Jweb_Guru »

grkvlt wrote: post #222
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moore's Law was originally about the number of transistors per unit area and that has absolutely stalled. They are comparing 72 and 64 core processors to single core ones to try to make the claim that "transistors per chip" are doubling in accordance with Moore's Law (which they still aren't--you can plot a line through and see that we are falling short of linear on a log scale). Are you really arguing that simply ma…

Moore's law was stated originally as the doublinkd of the number of transistors per integrated circuit per year, later modified by him to a doublingevery two years. Reading the article where he first proposed the rule (cited in the wikipedia article linked in parent) this confirms that definition, as opposed to transistors per unit area or other measures.

No, it was per area per economic unit originally, and the definition was changed in ways that don't make a lot of sense. Clearly the performance of a 72-core machine has little relevance to personal computing.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#225

Post by qayxc »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #195
qayxc wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very complex topic and there's a bunch of reasons for that. And no, software efficiency isn't even the main factor. Not even close. Just a few pointers: polling on peripherals instead of interrupts (i.e. USB vs. PS/2 and DIN) introducing input lag, software no longer running in ring-0 while being the sole process that owns all the hardware, concurrent processes and context switches, portability (and the req…

Apple II? I'm talking about things like VS6 vs modern VS. Even when performing the same tasks, which means modern VS has no reason to be doing more work than VS6, the modern one is less responsive. There are several videos on youtube demonstrating the dramatic difference.

Well 20-ish years ago when I was working with VS6, it ran like dog shit on contemporary hardware.

Big projects would pretty much kill it and the occasional crash was to be expected.

Sure, firing up VS6 on more modern hardware let it fly by comparison, but then again its features paled in comparison to those available with modern VS.

On the other hand, I don't use VS anymore, since VSCode is all I need and runs faster than VS6 back then (even on my 5 year old mid-range laptop) so no complains there.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#226

Post by [deleted] »

ubitaco wrote: post #216
qayxc wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the moon you have no atmosphere to do it with radiators with fans, so I gues you would have to make huge radiators which simply emit the heat away as infrared radiation? Exactly. You can still transport the heat efficiently away from the computer using heat exchangers with some medium, but in the end radiators with a large enough surface area will be required. Works well enough on the ISS, so I imagine it'd work…

I'm also not a physicist, but for the fun of the discussion... Radiative heat loss scales with the fourth power of temperature. I don't know what temperature the ISS radiators are but suppose they are around 300K. Then I think the radiative surface to keep something cool at 10K would need to be 30^4, or 810000 times larger per unit heat loss. So realistically I think you would need some kind of wacky very low tempera…

[deleted]

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#227

Post by [deleted] »

john_minsk wrote: post #202
anfilt wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moore's laws has nothing to do with how fast a chip is. It deals with how many transistors you can fit in a given area. This can equate to a faster chip because you now can do more at once. However, we hit the frequency limits a while ago for silicon. Particularly, parasitic capacitance is a huge limiting factor. A capacitor will start to act like a short circuit the faster your clock is. Moore's law has a little mor…

Since it can't go forever - it is time to update its definition to reflect what we are doing with computing now - adding cores and improving energy efficiency. No?

[deleted]

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#228

Post by anfilt »

john_minsk wrote: post #202
anfilt wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moore's laws has nothing to do with how fast a chip is. It deals with how many transistors you can fit in a given area. This can equate to a faster chip because you now can do more at once. However, we hit the frequency limits a while ago for silicon. Particularly, parasitic capacitance is a huge limiting factor. A capacitor will start to act like a short circuit the faster your clock is. Moore's law has a little mor…

Since it can't go forever - it is time to update its definition to reflect what we are doing with computing now - adding cores and improving energy efficiency. No?

adding more cores requires moores law. When we hit the end the only to get more cores will be either larger dies or more dies.

Moore's law does help with efficiency to some degree, small transistors generally require less power to switch. However, most the power is last due to the miles of wiring in a modern chip when running at such high clock cycles. Again, it's the parasitic capacitance.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#229

Post by ebalit »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #224
grkvlt wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moore's law was stated originally as the doublinkd of the number of transistors per integrated circuit per year, later modified by him to a doublingevery two years. Reading the article where he first proposed the rule (cited in the wikipedia article linked in parent) this confirms that definition, as opposed to transistors per unit area or other measures.

No, it was per area per economic unit originally, and the definition was changed in ways that don't make a lot of sense. Clearly the performance of a 72-core machine has little relevance to personal computing.

Not commenting on Moore's law, but I don't see how the last part is true when GPU have become a main component of personal computing. They are in fact becoming more and more important with the need for AI inference and always more demanding rendering tasks (both in resolution and frame rate).

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#230

Post by Jweb_Guru »

ebalit wrote: post #229
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it was per area per economic unit originally, and the definition was changed in ways that don't make a lot of sense. Clearly the performance of a 72-core machine has little relevance to personal computing.

Not commenting on Moore's law, but I don't see how the last part is true when GPU have become a main component of personal computing. They are in fact becoming more and more important with the need for AI inference and always more demanding rendering tasks (both in resolution and frame rate).

The vast majority of software isn't written for the GPU. That's still true today, and it will likely be true in ten years as well. Unless we reach a point where that changes (and most software can fit its restricted paradigm), we should compare apples to apples. If we were talking solely about GPU performance, I would be more inclined to agree with claims about "80x more processing power than 10 years ago" etc, though.
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