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A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

cacm.acm.org

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Re: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

#21

Post by ansible »

pjc50 wrote: post #20
gbrown_ wrote: post #17

I'd hardly call this a "Golden Age", precisely because of the shortcomings mentioned in the article. Regardless of how you may re-architect a processor you will still end up hitting CMOS limitations in time. To contrast my fantasy for "Golden Age" would be multiple viable replacements for CMOS that were actively being used in a variety of processors.

What specifically is "wrong" with CMOS? Not small enough for you yet? :)

Reaching "the end of Moore's Law" is a super big deal, and I still don't understand why people aren't worried about it more in general.

It will cause a crash in the entire tech industry, which will throw the global economy into a depression.

Re: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

#22

Post by 3chelon »

simula67 wrote: post #8

> Today, 99% of 32-bit and 64-bit processors are RISC > Concluding this historical review, we can say the marketplace settled the RISC-CISC debate; CISC won the later stages of the PC era, but RISC is winning the post-PC era It is clear that his assessment is right, but isn't the 99% number too high ? Servers, laptops and desktops still run x86 and they are CISC ( unless you are counting x86 as RISC based on microcod…

The article specifically points out that Intel/AMD took on board all the lessons from RISC as they evolved the x86 series and now it's pretty much a RISC architecture too.

Re: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

#23

Post by ghaff »

simula67 wrote: post #8

> Today, 99% of 32-bit and 64-bit processors are RISC > Concluding this historical review, we can say the marketplace settled the RISC-CISC debate; CISC won the later stages of the PC era, but RISC is winning the post-PC era It is clear that his assessment is right, but isn't the 99% number too high ? Servers, laptops and desktops still run x86 and they are CISC ( unless you are counting x86 as RISC based on microcod…

I assume they’re counting them as RISC cores plus microcode that makes them compatible with older x86 CISC designs. Modern x86 is RISC under the covers by any meaningful definition-/and also shares pretty much all the problems.

Re: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

#24

Post by ghaff »

ansible wrote: post #21
pjc50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specifically is "wrong" with CMOS? Not small enough for you yet? :)

Reaching "the end of Moore's Law" is a super big deal, and I still don't understand why people aren't worried about it more in general. It will cause a crash in the entire tech industry, which will throw the global economy into a depression.

Not sure why the downvotes whether or not you take this outcome as a given. CMOS process scaling has been a uniquely powerful driver of the tech industry since circa the 1990s. It’s not obvious how you lose that and don’t have an impact.

We’ve gotten a bit of a reprieve because things like GPUs turn out to be good architectures for many compute intensive workloads.

Re: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

#25

Post by 3chelon »

mav3rick wrote: post #15
ChucklesNorris wrote: post #14

I think back to the old Cat Stevens song "I Want To Live In A Wigwam", except now I think maybe one day I'd like to live in a Faraday cage. Computers, like guns, drugs, and any other invention of man are not inherently evil. All these things can be used for good or evil. Unfortunately, the fly in the ointment is human nature. With the convergence of cheaper but increased computing power and the monetization of person…

This fear mongering goes on since the days of Henry Ford. Technology has been a boon for many many people. I can't imagine a world with many more people dying or without access to information.

Indeed, since the days of the Gutenberg press. All new tech heralds the end of times.

Re: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

#26

Post by wibble10 »

ansible wrote: post #21
pjc50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specifically is "wrong" with CMOS? Not small enough for you yet? :)

Reaching "the end of Moore's Law" is a super big deal, and I still don't understand why people aren't worried about it more in general. It will cause a crash in the entire tech industry, which will throw the global economy into a depression.

How will reaching the end of Moore’s law cause a crash like this?

Do you mean that future requirements will outstrip capacity? I don’t think this has been true for some time, we run a lot more systems and tend to scale horizontally; doubling compute power every n period isn’t a hard requirement imo.

Re: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

#27

Post by j1vms »

ansible wrote: post #21
pjc50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specifically is "wrong" with CMOS? Not small enough for you yet? :)

Reaching "the end of Moore's Law" is a super big deal, and I still don't understand why people aren't worried about it more in general. It will cause a crash in the entire tech industry, which will throw the global economy into a depression.

Reaching "the end of Moore's Law" has so far been ended up being more of a problem for Moore's company than anyone else.

Between GPUs, more power efficient designs (due to heavy mainstream interest in mobile technology), more work put into algorithmic efficiency, and promising early developments in quantum computing, it appears the focus has shifted away from relying on more transistors per square inch for ensuring the industry's future growth.

Re: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

#28

Post by ghaff »

wibble10 wrote: post #26
ansible wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reaching "the end of Moore's Law" is a super big deal, and I still don't understand why people aren't worried about it more in general. It will cause a crash in the entire tech industry, which will throw the global economy into a depression.

How will reaching the end of Moore’s law cause a crash like this? Do you mean that future requirements will outstrip capacity? I don’t think this has been true for some time, we run a lot more systems and tend to scale horizontally; doubling compute power every n period isn’t a hard requirement imo.

Without higher throughput systems including but not limited to CPUs, you can to some degree just throw more servers at the problem. But now you’ve doubled (maybe more like tripled) the cost to get 2x the performance. And some applications like mobile and sensors depend on miniaturization for a given capability.

Re: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

#29

Post by 4thaccount »

mpweiher wrote: post #10
4thaccount wrote: post #2

I'm trying to think of what are some neat computer architectures out there. Chuck Moore's "Green Arrays" is kinda cool and so is the Parallela board.

Transputer. Hardware multitasking and link-communication and a very compact instruction set. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCore_Architecture SOAR (Smalltalk On A RISC), though the conclusion there was mostly that a plain old RISC will do. I wonder if that is still true today. Rekursiv OO computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rekursiv NEC dataflow processor. https://books.goo…

Never heard of SOAR. It would be pretty sweet though to have a powerful & multi-core chip running a Smalltalk OS that could do something with all the cores. I'd also like to see kOS from Arthur Whitney if he ever finishes it, although I'd never be able to afford any of their products.

Re: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

#30

Post by pjc50 »

ansible wrote: post #21
pjc50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specifically is "wrong" with CMOS? Not small enough for you yet? :)

Reaching "the end of Moore's Law" is a super big deal, and I still don't understand why people aren't worried about it more in general. It will cause a crash in the entire tech industry, which will throw the global economy into a depression.

I was expecting an answer more along the lines of gallium arsenide or SiC process technology, but OK!

It was always going to end at some point, because we're down to just above 100 atoms gate thickness. What we're seeing is not an "end" but a soft landing that really started some years ago with massively multicore processors. The industry has started adapting to horizontal scaling rather than "free" process improvements. There is still an awful lot of low hanging fruit on the software side for performance improvements, but that's harder because it involves removing or adapting abstraction layers.

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