Light has been stuck at c for the last decade, too. When will it break this barrier?
This is the most awesome comment in this post.
Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
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Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#12Clock speed is an unfortunate marketing gimmick anymore. I dare compare it to peak horsepower. A 3ghz chip from today will run circles around a chip from 2002, and with less power to boot. AMD is ahead in the clock speed race, but gets beat handily by "slower" Intel processors, while using twice the power.
The focus going forward is going to be on power efficiency and using more cores, not clock speed.
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#13Low power and multicore are cute and all, but imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384GHz cores.
Ok, now imagine what a 384GHz core would cost.
(hint: probably more than the world GDP. Each)
Ok, NOW imagine what 10,000 3.84GHz cores would cost (100 times more aggregate cycles per second than 1x 384GHz core). What's that, you figure a measly $10-30M instead of more money than exists on earth?
Any research simulation is going to want to be parallelized anyway. You'll bump into the limits of the 384GHz core, no doubt about that, at which point you are back to distributed computing. For limitless complexity and limitless appetite for computing power, distributed computing will always be the answer.
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#14Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#15Instructions per cycle has been getting somewhat better, and it is that number multiplied by the clock speed that is a better indicator of actual performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle
Everything else needs to keep up to - it is pointless having a fast processor if it has to keep waiting on memory, storage and the network. Those are very slowly catching up and also lead to overall improved performance.
I've been hoping that asynchronous implementations would take over. In theory parts of the chip can run at whatever speeds are best for them at that time, and not have to be synchronised with other parts. And when not in use they easily power down. There were some async ARM chips made, but no progress since 2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#16Clock speed is an unfortunate marketing gimmick anymore. I dare compare it to peak horsepower. A 3ghz chip from today will run circles around a chip from 2002, and with less power to boot. AMD is ahead in the clock speed race, but gets beat handily by "slower" Intel processors, while using twice the power. The focus going forward is going to be on power efficiency and using more cores, not clock speed.
Actually, the performance difference is small. The biggest gain we have today is multi-cores, so no one thread can hog all processing pipelines. If you're pushing through 1 billion instructions, it will still take 1/3 of a second for your CPU to chunk through all of it, but other code can be processed simultaneously on another core.
I know, I know. My laptop (Lenovo T400) has almost the exact same specs as the old Sunfire V20 rackmounts I have (2x2.4ghz cores, 4gb ram, passable video), but the laptop can run on batteries for 5 hours.
But clockspeed is still king -- this T400 run circles around a Lenovo W520 with a 1.6ghz Core i7 and 3x the ram. I know because I had a W520 for work, and I could see the difference.
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#17Low power and multicore are cute and all, but imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384GHz cores.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!!!
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#18Low power and multicore are cute and all, but imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384GHz cores.
In one clock cycle, light would be able to travel about 780 micrometers. The real propagation speed of signals on a chip will be substantially less than the speed of light, and it gets slower at smaller feature sizes. This could be tricky.
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine the type of machine learning we could do on low power 384GHz multi-cores
Imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384 low power 1GHz cores.
Not everything parallelizes nicely. Given enough processors, serial computation eventually becomes the bottleneck:
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#20The problem is physics. We can't get to higher clock speeds with current materials, due to heat. It's kind of like how fighter jets haven't got any faster (top speed anyway) since the 60's...
Well...it's more complex...
With die sizes as small as they are, we have a problem where electrons...jump...through basically solid walls from an electrified wire to an unpowered wire. Now, turning on one circuit means the circuit browns-out and a neighboring circuit gets half-powered.