41–48 of 48 posts
Cool. 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.
I wonder: what ratio of FLOPs would you get, between this chip, and an array of "low power mobile whatever thing"s adding up to an equivalent power-draw?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was in Intel's dark days of P4 / "Netburst" microarchitecture. They goosed lots of GHz out of the chip by going with a very deep pipeline, but performance in real-world applications was terrible. (deep processor pipelines kill you when you mispredict a branch). I sat in on a few sales calls from Intel about their new Pentium M / "Centrino" mobile architecture in 2003. What was amazing was that their performance…
I wonder why it took until later in 2006 before a version of Pentium M showed up with 64-bit support.
EDIT: it was actually mid-2004, as noted below.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder why it took until later in 2006 before a version of Pentium M showed up with 64-bit support.
Intel didn't release any 64-bit x86 processors until 2005. They bet so heavily on the alternative, Itanium, that it took them a few years to recover. EDIT: it was actually mid-2004, as noted below.
If 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?
Low power and multicore are cute and all, but imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384GHz cores.
Unfortunately, many machine learning algorithms aren't easily parallelizable. Consider any boosting ensemble learner, such as the popular random forest, which optimizes the result from the previous iteration. (I run the machine learning startup diffbot.com and we could really use faster cycles.)
Clock 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 t…
And you can't really ignore the massive improvements gained via GPUs. There are your 100x differences
The 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-25
Since then Vmax has been declining, as the aerodynamics and mechanical complications ( e.g variable intake ramps ) of higher-Mach flight were determined to be less useful than transonic manouevrability and sustained supercruising.
The exception to this trend has been the superfighter category ( F-111, F-14, F-15, F-22, Su-27 ) which have maintained the same ~ M2.5 Vmax due to their specific role. Yes, even the F-111 was meant to be a fleet fighter.
But none have pushed up past the heady M3.0 level that was routinely broken by a series of prototypes in the 1960s.
The 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...
That is also what is happening with computers - it is simply more efficient to cram out more instructions per clock cycle than it is to cram out more clock cycles.