Low power and multicore are cute and all, but imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384GHz cores.
You could invent 1000 new ML algorithms in the time it would take you to engineer that.
Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
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Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law
Many machine learning methods parallelize extremely nicely.
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#23Power consumption is much better.
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#24Low power and multicore are cute and all, but imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384GHz cores.
Imagine the type of machine learning we could do on low power 384GHz multi-cores
I'm afraid the machine you'd get would be a furnace or a torch... AFAIK power that you'd need to dissipate is linear on frequency, so unless we will discover technology to radically lower the voltage used in CPUs or some other parameter, dissipating 100x heat would be kind of a big problem for such CPU.
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#25Clock 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.
This is true, but it's missing the point. A modern CPU gets probably 50% more work out of a median clock cycle and runs 33% faster for single threaded (turbo) workloads. So it's twice as fast. And sure, there are four of them on the die.
But back up another decade to 1992, where a top of the line PC was a 50MHz 486 with well under half the IPC of the linked Northwood running 60x slower.
For those of us who remember the 80's and 90's, it's a very different world we live in.
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#26Light has been stuck at c for the last decade, too. When will it break this barrier?
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Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#27Power consumption is much better.
x86 & x86-64 cores still create heat like incandescent lightbulbs.
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#28If we can't make the clock speed faster what about massively increasing the size of the on chip cache? I think they call them like l2 and l3 or something. If I had 1gb of cache then maybe my whole program could run without doing much main memory access. That would be fast right?
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#29The 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...
The MIG-25 is rated at Mach 2.8 GHz, but can be overclocked to 3.2.
Re: Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
#30Cool. Back then there still were articles about a new faster desktop CPU! Today, whenever there's news about a CPU, it's about some other low power mobile whatever thing that is not faster. Yawn.