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Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

arstechnica.com

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Re: Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

#11

Post by saintgimp »

hatethis wrote: post #8

No. Every single time someone supposes that any piece of technology is approaching its limits, the answer is no. Technology will continue to improve and advance as we make new discoveries. The simple fact is we do not know the future, so pretending like we know what things will be like in 20 or 50 years is just pointless. What's with this obsession of taking today's technological knowledge and assuming that things wo…

That's a very unreasonable point of view. Sure, it's true that in the past 200 years we've had an explosion of technological progress but there's absolutely no reason to assume that it's possible to continue it for an infinite amount of time. It's rather more likely that over time we'll discover the lines that separate "hard but possible" from "theoretically impossible given the physics of this universe". The only real question is when that will happen for any given area of technology.

Asserting that technology will just continue to improve and advance forever simply makes you sound like a stock-market broker in 2007.

Re: Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

#12

Post by Xcelerate »

lnanek2 wrote: post #9

They say we can't get smaller than an atom, but electrons are smaller than an atom, and we don't even have to use just the charge but can also use properties like spin and momentum to get more values out of them. I.e. spintronics. Then of course there are photons as well. The article mentions itself that we use light for etching features even less than the wavelength of the light nowadays. Sometimes you need a big re…

I agree with you there. It's not unreasonable to me that people might devise a way to push against the Planck limit in terms of the space that computation takes up.

Re: Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

#13

Post by DiabloD3 »

The question I want to ask is, are generic CPUs now fast enough that people no longer need faster CPUs? I have an i7-4771 on my desktop (bought instead of 4770K because I wanted TSX... thanks Intel ;), and I can't really imagine much use for an even faster CPU unless I'm gaming or doing heavy compute work.

Re: Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

#14

Post by [deleted] »

hatethis wrote: post #8

No. Every single time someone supposes that any piece of technology is approaching its limits, the answer is no. Technology will continue to improve and advance as we make new discoveries. The simple fact is we do not know the future, so pretending like we know what things will be like in 20 or 50 years is just pointless. What's with this obsession of taking today's technological knowledge and assuming that things wo…

[deleted]

Re: Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

#15

Post by nightski »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #13

The question I want to ask is, are generic CPUs now fast enough that people no longer need faster CPUs? I have an i7-4771 on my desktop (bought instead of 4770K because I wanted TSX... thanks Intel ;), and I can't really imagine much use for an even faster CPU unless I'm gaming or doing heavy compute work.

Ah yes, the old 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Re: Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

#16

Post by userbinator »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #13

The question I want to ask is, are generic CPUs now fast enough that people no longer need faster CPUs? I have an i7-4771 on my desktop (bought instead of 4770K because I wanted TSX... thanks Intel ;), and I can't really imagine much use for an even faster CPU unless I'm gaming or doing heavy compute work.

No, I don't think the things most people do with computers should require any faster hardware; the problem is that software is often being written to require increasingly more resources under the false assumption that processing speed and memory are "infinite" or close to it.

The exponential growth that started many decades ago has promoted a culture of extreme waste. From the earliest notions of "premature optimisation", and the rise of structured programming and OOP with its many-layered abstractions, to the latest trend of ultra-high-level frameworks and the web-application movement, there is this constantly present notion that "abstractions and computing power is free, but programmer time is expensive". Although opposition to this seems to have increased in the recent years, it's still a prevalent attitude and being taught currently in many schools. People are being forced to frequently upgrade their hardware (with the associated waste and manufacturing costs) just so they can run the latest versions of software - often to do the same things at the same speeds they were doing them before. It's likely not too far of a stretch to say that software on average is now a few orders of magnitude larger and slower than it should be.

This trajectory follows similarly to the early part of what happened to the car industry - fuel was initially cheap so manufacturers (and consumers) concentrated little on fuel efficiency, but starting in the 70s oil shortages made for some pretty rapid changes as people became aware that what they were doing was not sustainable. There has been much growth in interest in efficient hardware recently, which is good, but the other part of the equation, software, is also very important. Thus I think anyone who still believes in that mantra about programmer time, when working on software intended for a large number of users, is as absurd as someone in the car industry saying "engineer time is expensive, but fuel is cheap". Processors may be getting limited by the laws of physics but I don't think many programmers have reached the limits of their brainpower yet. :-)

Re: Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

#17

Post by greenmountin »

_username_ wrote: post #7
Artemis2 wrote: post #4

A metric that really puts things in perspective is the following: take a common consumer CPU, clocked at 3.4Ghz. That means it executes 3,400,000,000 cycles per second. Divide the speed of light by this number, and you obtain approximatively 0,088m. During the time your standard desktop CPU takes to finish a cycle, light only travels 9 centimeters.

Just a side not that light in other medium than air travels slower. It's not 300k km/h but ~200k km/h in FR4 microstrip (6"/ns where 1ns is equivalent to 1GHz clock).

translated: "Just an aside: note that the speed that light travels in any medium is slower than it travels in vacuum. Its speed is no longer 3e8 m/s, but a third less in, for example, FR-4 microstrip (a popular prototype board dielectric). The effective speed is about 6 inches per ns, or at least, 6 inches per cycle of a 1 GHz clock."

Re: Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

#18

Post by oldmanjay »

userbinator wrote: post #16
DiabloD3 wrote: post #13

The question I want to ask is, are generic CPUs now fast enough that people no longer need faster CPUs? I have an i7-4771 on my desktop (bought instead of 4770K because I wanted TSX... thanks Intel ;), and I can't really imagine much use for an even faster CPU unless I'm gaming or doing heavy compute work.

No, I don't think the things most people do with computers should require any faster hardware; the problem is that software is often being written to require increasingly more resources under the false assumption that processing speed and memory are "infinite" or close to it. The exponential growth that started many decades ago has promoted a culture of extreme waste. From the earliest notions of "premature optimisat…

I have to assume that you ignore the absolute explosion in usefulness achieved in the last two decades for this "wasteful" software.

there are too many misconceptions and strawmen in your post to write a full rebuttal, so instead I'll just thank you for the (unintentional) laughs.

Re: Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

#19

Post by Chronic29 »

oldmanjay wrote: post #18
userbinator wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think the things most people do with computers should require any faster hardware; the problem is that software is often being written to require increasingly more resources under the false assumption that processing speed and memory are "infinite" or close to it. The exponential growth that started many decades ago has promoted a culture of extreme waste. From the earliest notions of "premature optimisat…

I have to assume that you ignore the absolute explosion in usefulness achieved in the last two decades for this "wasteful" software. there are too many misconceptions and strawmen in your post to write a full rebuttal, so instead I'll just thank you for the (unintentional) laughs.

You won't be laughing in 6 years when you can't afford 512 GB of RAM per chrome tab
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