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Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

mashable.com

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Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#31

Post by tptacek »

pork wrote: post #28
tptacek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not. Most modern ciphers have security bounds measured in solar systems worth of atom-sized supercomputers. Hardware-accelerated attacks on 1024 bit RSA keys (for which no real-world attacks are published) are predicated on custom silicon. A massive, massive improvement in compute might hasten SHA-1's demise, but SHA-1 is already on life support today. It is unlikely that even a huge unexpected leap in compu…

Or in other words, you're only going to get constant factor improvements in asymptotic run times with these chips.

Yep.

I'm not a cryptographer, but generally when we get to the point where we can envision how a sudden reduction in compute cost could threaten an algorithm or construction, that's when people start freaking out. That's where we're at with SHA1, but I don't know what other building block is in the same position.

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#32

Post by shithead »

burgerbrain wrote: post #26
shithead wrote: post #15

Reality check: this is total bullshit. A miracle glue will not solve power dissipation problems, not even if it were a perfect thermal conductor.

It's not a miracle, it's science. And if they can back it up, it doesn't matter if you find it inconceivable.

It's a sandwich. If the glue has zero thermal resistance, the silicon does not.

Science, my foot.

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#33

Post by kylelibra »

zeteo wrote: post #29

This is a poorly written, sensationalistic article. Here's the original press release: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35358.wss Basically, this is about IBM and 3M starting a new research project. Whether it would work, how long it would take, at what cost - these are all open questions.

I think you just described 90% of the content on Mashable.

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#36

Post by pointyhat »

shithead wrote: post #32
burgerbrain wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a miracle, it's science. And if they can back it up, it doesn't matter if you find it inconceivable.

It's a sandwich. If the glue has zero thermal resistance, the silicon does not. Science, my foot.

Agree. I've seen 10+ variations of this over the last 20 years and they've all lead to dead ends, fireballs coming off wafers and 12 inch long heatsinks (HP PA-RISC for example).

The miracle solution is change the way we do things rather than rice up our existing architecture.

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#37

Post by katox »

joezydeco wrote: post #12
smhinsey wrote: post #9

Does anyone know by what metric it will be 1,000 faster? It seems like a technique for having massive numbers of cores in parallel, but I'm not sure how the adhesive would address any specific improvements to the cores themselves. That said, even if it's just a way to get 1,000-core CPUs or whatever, it sounds like a remarkable breakthrough.

A lot of wait states in a CPU come from accessing memory outside of cache. If you make all the RAM in your system the same as cache, you'd get a huge leap.

If RAM clocked higher and pushed closer to a processing cpu would make everything 50 times faster it'd still need 20 times as much silicon. Considering ideal heat dissipation such a system would still need let's say 20x100w = 2kW of input power. Which is about what a fast boiling kettle needs. How much realistic is that?

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#38

Post by sliverstorm »

Let me get this straight. Today, we have trouble dissapating the heat produced by a single die.

To solve this problem, we are going to stack 1000 dies, and produce 1000x as much heat.

Who cares about whether the heat can travel up the column- where is the improvement in cooling technology to remove 1000x the heat from the die stack?

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#39

Post by burgerbrain »

shithead wrote: post #32
burgerbrain wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a miracle, it's science. And if they can back it up, it doesn't matter if you find it inconceivable.

It's a sandwich. If the glue has zero thermal resistance, the silicon does not. Science, my foot.

Nobody is asserting that it has zero thermal resistance, or that the stack will have zero thermal resistance. Only that it may have adequately low thermal resistance.

Random people on the Internet calling "bullshit" isn't how science works. Whether or not they are able to produce results is the only thing that matters.

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#40

Post by sek »

zeteo wrote: post #29

This is a poorly written, sensationalistic article. Here's the original press release: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35358.wss Basically, this is about IBM and 3M starting a new research project. Whether it would work, how long it would take, at what cost - these are all open questions.

There is a lot of sensationalist PR from IBM. The Cat Brain, the Smarter Planet thing, the AI processor and now a 1k times faster processor..... some arbitrary stuff an nothing concrete. I wonder what this PR strategy should accomplish and who is the target for this.
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