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

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

#61

Post by burgerbrain »

angrycoder wrote: post #49
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?

Research.

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

#62

Post by ori_b »

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?

The point with 3d layout is that you can have shorter interconnects, which means far less resistive heating, and less junction loss. It also means that your path lengths can be shortened, possibly allowing you to bump up the frequency.

Stacking stuff means you should be able to run cooler for the same amount of processing power.

1000x? I think that's probably BS. But I can see this being a significant win.

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

#63

Post by Zaak »

katox wrote: post #37
joezydeco wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of wait states in a CPU come from accessing memory outside of cache. If you make all the RAM in your system the same as cache, you'd get a huge leap.

If RAM clocked higher and pushed closer to a processing cpu would make everything 50 times faster it'd still need 20 times as much silicon. Considering ideal heat dissipation such a system would still need let's say 20x100w = 2kW of input power. Which is about what a fast boiling kettle needs. How much realistic is that?

Where do you get the 20 times as much silicon number? For example, SRAM typically uses 6 transistors per bit, as opposed to 1 transistor for DRAM. What are the other 14 transistors doing?

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

#66

Post by danmaz74 »

Tycho wrote: post #22
SwellJoe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you're in the right place? If you believe making bigger levers for human minds is evil, this might not be the right community for you, since it's what most of us are trying to do on a daily basis.

I like the way you phrased that - levers for the human mind. Maybe when we talk about the fight against poverty and unemployment, we should talk about it in terms of the type of levers we are making. Like high-frequency trading is a lever that only very smart, very educated people can actually use. But all humans no matter their intelligence or education possess a flexibility that would let them be productive (beyond…

High-frequency trading looks to me much more like a bug of the system - or at least a undesirable side effect - than a lever for the human mind. Most innovations, though, fall in the lever category :)

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

#68

Post by RyanKearney »

I think I remember reading an Intel article about something like this not too long ago. You can't just do this because of a few factors. When you start stacking the die like this, the latency grows. You now have to wait for signals to travel up through multiple processor die before it gets to the die that will process the instruction. It's this reason that you end up with diminishing returns when making processors "taller".

Not only that, but unless you can increase the speed of the FSB by 100 times, you will have a serious bottleneck between the processor and the motherboard. You're now funneling 100 CPU's worth of information through a socket and medium designed for 1 CPU.

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

#69

Post by jackfoxy »

ori_b wrote: post #62
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?

The point with 3d layout is that you can have shorter interconnects, which means far less resistive heating, and less junction loss. It also means that your path lengths can be shortened, possibly allowing you to bump up the frequency. Stacking stuff means you should be able to run cooler for the same amount of processing power. 1000x? I think that's probably BS. But I can see this being a significant win.

How about L1 cache (or even just L3 cache) measured in gigabytes? That won't increase the execution speed of individual instructions, but your effective processing power would increase dramatically.

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

#70

Post by sliverstorm »

ori_b wrote: post #62
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?

The point with 3d layout is that you can have shorter interconnects, which means far less resistive heating, and less junction loss. It also means that your path lengths can be shortened, possibly allowing you to bump up the frequency. Stacking stuff means you should be able to run cooler for the same amount of processing power. 1000x? I think that's probably BS. But I can see this being a significant win.

This makes me think of an interesting question- the back side of a die is raw silicon. How do you stack die and still interconnect? Do you sink metal through the bottom of the wafer?
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