PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
1–10 of 162 posts
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#2What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#3I remember back in 2006 I used to browse overclock forums to overclock my pentium 4, I tons of fun consuming lots of instructions, I learned the bios, changed PLL clocks, mem clocks etc.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#4What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?
The energy consumed is cv^2f.
It makes no sense to keep increasing frequency as you make power way worse.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#5The i486DX 33MHz was introduced in May 1990. A 30x increase, or about five doublings, in clock speeds over ten years. That's of course not the whole truth; the Athlon could do much more in one cycle than the 486. In any case, in 2010 we clearly did not have 30GHz processors – by then, the era of exponentially rising clock speeds was very decidedly over. I bought an original quadcore i7 in 2009 and used it for the next fifteen years. In that time, roughly one doubling in the number of cores and one doubling in clock speeds occurred.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#6What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?
The energy consumed is cv^2f. It makes no sense to keep increasing frequency as you make power way worse.
So heat. There’s efforts to switch to optics which don’t have that heat problem so much but have the problem that it’s really hard to build an optical transistor. + anywhere your interfacing with the electrical world you’re back to the heat problem.
Maybe reversible computing will help unlock several more orders of magnitude of growth.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#7The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements).
Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#8The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
SSDs were such a revolution though, and a really rewarding upgrade. I'd fit SSDs to friend and family computers as an upgrade.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#9The i486DX 33MHz was introduced in May 1990. A 30x increase, or about five doublings, in clock speeds over ten years. That's of course not the whole truth; the Athlon could do much more in one cycle than the 486. In any case, in 2010 we clearly did not have 30GHz processors – by then, the era of exponentially rising clock speeds was very decidedly over. I bought an original quadcore i7 in 2009 and used it for the nex…
"The era of exponentially rising clock speeds" was already over in 2003, when the 130-nm Pentium 4 reached 3.2GHz.
All the later CMOS fabrication processes, starting with the 90-nm process (in 2004), have provided only very small improvements in the clock frequency, so that now, 23 years later after 2003, the desktop CPUs have not reached a double clock frequency yet.
In the history of computers, the decade with the highest rate of clock frequency increase has been 1993 to 2003, during which the clock frequency has increased from 67 MHz in 1993 in the first Pentium, up to 3.2 GHz in the last Northwood Pentium 4. So the clock frequency had increased almost 50 times during that decade.
For comparison, in the previous decade, 1983 to 1993, the clock frequency in mass-produced CPUs had increased only around 5 times, i.e. at a rate about 10 times slower than in the next decade.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#10What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?
Like any doubling rule, the buck has to stop somewhere. Higher energy usage + smaller geometry means much more exotic analog physics to worry about in chips. I’m not a silicon engineer by any means but I’d expect 10Ghz cycles will be optical or very exotically cooled or not coming at us at all.