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Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

mashable.com

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Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#41

Post by mahyarm »

kristofferR wrote: post #21

This is really exciting. I don't see anything with this techology that would limit it to just CPU chips. I'd imagine it would work just as well in a GPU chip. That would make incredibly realistic simulation of graphics and physics possible. It would obiviously revolutionize gaming completely, but most imporantly it would revolutize science. Imagine having the power of the whole Folding@Home network in your laptop! Im…

The glue helps with heat dissipation, that heat came from using electricity. 10'000 systems stacked on top of each other would consume 1MW assuming each one would consume 100W of power at full usage.

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#42

Post by gwern »

sek wrote: post #40
zeteo wrote: post #29

This is a poorly written, sensationalistic article. Here's the original press release: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35358.wss Basically, this is about IBM and 3M starting a new research project. Whether it would work, how long it would take, at what cost - these are all open questions.

There is a lot of sensationalist PR from IBM. The Cat Brain, the Smarter Planet thing, the AI processor and now a 1k times faster processor..... some arbitrary stuff an nothing concrete. I wonder what this PR strategy should accomplish and who is the target for this.

> I wonder what this PR strategy should accomplish and who is the target for this.

'No one ever got fired for buying IBM.'

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#43

Post by tobiasu »

sliverstorm wrote: post #38

Let me get this straight. Today, we have trouble dissapating the heat produced by a single die. To solve this problem, we are going to stack 1000 dies, and produce 1000x as much heat. Who cares about whether the heat can travel up the column- where is the improvement in cooling technology to remove 1000x the heat from the die stack?

IBM talks about up to 100 layers, not 1000. Not all components have the same power requirements or are even powered up at the same time.

Also this is IBM research. They don't need to make robust processors for the consumer market. If the CPU requires watercooling or better, IBM can do and sell that. They already have such solutions for super computers and mainframes in the field.

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#45

Post by kisielk »

ramidarigaz wrote: post #16
starwed wrote: post #13

So this is a way of dissipating heat more efficiently, such that chips can be apparently be stacked on top of each other -- does that really help all that much for consumer (and especially mobile) stuff? Seems like you're still generating the same total amount of heat, that needs venting from the machine. And still consuming the same amount of power. I'm sure there's some value here, but it's not going to arise from…

Sure there's value. The biggest obstacle to cranking up clock speed is heat dissipation. If we can get the heat away from the chip faster, we can increase the clock speed.

I still don't really see how it would help with heat dissipation overall. Most low power desktop CPUs seem to run at around 45W these days. If you stacked 10 of them, presumably you'd get somewhere around 450W. 100 of them would give you 4.5MW. First off, how do you get the electricity to power these, and secondly what do you do with the heat after it's left the CPU?

For servers, you face the same problem. It's already possible to get power and heat density that is more than what your typical datacenter can handle. If the density increased by even 10 times we would presumably need some serious advances in cooling to be able to handle all those servers.

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#46

Post by burgerbrain »

ent wrote: post #44
burgerbrain wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make that quip about any hardware improvement.

well, except for the current bottleneck

You'll always have an IO bottleneck of some sort, even if we get memory back up to CPU speeds again.

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#49

Post by angrycoder »

kristofferR wrote: post #21

This is really exciting. I don't see anything with this techology that would limit it to just CPU chips. I'd imagine it would work just as well in a GPU chip. That would make incredibly realistic simulation of graphics and physics possible. It would obiviously revolutionize gaming completely, but most imporantly it would revolutize science. Imagine having the power of the whole Folding@Home network in your laptop! Im…

What life saving things are currently CPU bound?

so, asking questions now results in downvotes?

Re: Breakthrough: The Secret to Making Processors 1,000 Times Faster

#50

Post by swah »

ramidarigaz wrote: post #16
starwed wrote: post #13

So this is a way of dissipating heat more efficiently, such that chips can be apparently be stacked on top of each other -- does that really help all that much for consumer (and especially mobile) stuff? Seems like you're still generating the same total amount of heat, that needs venting from the machine. And still consuming the same amount of power. I'm sure there's some value here, but it's not going to arise from…

Sure there's value. The biggest obstacle to cranking up clock speed is heat dissipation. If we can get the heat away from the chip faster, we can increase the clock speed.

I thought it was about delivering the clock signal to the processor (before the next cycle) ?

As I understand you have to make circuits faster and smaller at the same time, so you still have time for clock distribution...

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