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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

#71

Post by rbanffy »

RyanKearney wrote: post #68

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 "t…

> but unless you can increase the speed of the FSB by 100 times

... or stack a couple dozen gigabytes of L1 cache through a ridiculously wide internal bus. Not all chips would be processors.

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

#72

Post by jbri »

RyanKearney wrote: post #68

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 "t…

What if you go for a more SOC-like design and stick the memory in the processor tower itself? The major bottleneck there is really in talking to memory, and you could that eliminate that entirely.

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

#73

Post by rbanffy »

idonthack wrote: post #24
AshleysBrain wrote: post #20

So... the CPU will complete its work in nanoseconds... then go back to waiting milliseconds for I/O, right?

RAM can be placed in the stack, eliminating slow trips accross the frontside bus. The only remaining bottleneck should be hdd access.

You can also stack flash, phase-change or memristor-based memory in there too.

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

#74

Post by rbanffy »

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?

> What life saving things are currently CPU bound?

Drug research, gene mapping, climate modeling...

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

#75

Post by rbanffy »

swah wrote: post #50
ramidarigaz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> still have time for clock distribution...

We are talking about pretty radical processor designs. Why not go asynchronous if we are talking about coordinating multiple layers of silicon?

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

#76

Post by rbanffy »

swah wrote: post #47

Why does HW seem to advance more than SW?

Because for most consumer-grade computing you are limited to Wintel. Multi-socket and multi-core only became popular after the 9x-NT Windows transition. 64-bits didn't became popular until Vista.

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

#77

Post by ChuckMcM »

Bzzzzzt! And thank you for playing.

I miss Jim Gray, he really did see things clearly. His response to the Alpha processor was that some day a computer would be a smoking hot, hairy golf ball. The reasoning was straight forward, spheres have the shortest paths between any two points, as density increased you needed more and more connections (wires) which were getting finer and finer in diameter, and power dissipation, well it wasn't going anywhere as electrons moving around bump into things, get over it.

My speculation is that the future is carbon for a variety of reasons. In its many forms it has all the properties you need to make chips, from diamond insulators to graphene conductors and nano-tube semiconductors. It can make light, it can trap light, it can conduct heat like there is no tomorrow. Truly, the day we can drop layers of carbon down and control the structure as it drops, think 'maker-bot with a molecular carbon extruder head that works at nanometer scale' its game on for truly mind blowing electronics.

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

#78

Post by starwed »

rbanffy wrote: post #75
swah wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> still have time for clock distribution... We are talking about pretty radical processor designs. Why not go asynchronous if we are talking about coordinating multiple layers of silicon?

Wouldn't a principle advantage of an actual, innovative 3D chip be better component distribution? That is, on average all the parts will be much closer to each other, than if they were arranged on a 2D surface.

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

#79

Post by ori_b »

jackfoxy wrote: post #69
ori_b wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that as cache size gets bigger, the associative memory lookup gets slower. There's a tradeoff.

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

#80

Post by merraksh »

kisielk wrote: post #45
ramidarigaz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alrea…

100x45W = 4.5 kW, not megawatt. 4.5 kilowatt is the same order of magnitude of a dryer.
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