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We know how to make them faster. How to make faster CPUs viable & affordable to the public though, that's a hard problem to solve.

by thecopy 10y ago

RX14 10y ago
Intel essentially has a monopoly on the market for desktop cpus, which can't help.
- thecopy 10y ago
  Affordable air-cooled x86-CPUs at > 4GHz will disrupt that very quickly.
  - k__ 10y ago
    Is x86 still needed? I mean the ARM stuff is getting more traction and maybe it will run around x86 in the next years.
    - wbl 10y ago
      POWER already did by sucking vast amounts of electricity and dumping heat. Getting a high IPC isn't easy and leads to lots of thermal dissapation. Odd arches might make a comeback but don't help much.
- jabl 10y ago
  If we assume that the economic model of CPU manufacturing is essentially - very large upfront costs in R&D and improved fabs - The marginal cost for each additional CPU manufactured is, in fact, very low Then, isn't this pretty much the textbook example of a natural monopoly? I.e. in such a case, if the market was spread out over more suppliers, would the customer in the end pay more due to the vendors amortizing the R&D costs over fewer units sold? Vs. the current situation where customers are paying monopoly prices to the incumbent vendor.
jabl 10y ago
> We know how to make them faster. Well... Seems the reason for the "multicore revolution" that started around 2005-ish(?) for desktop/x86 server CPU's was largely that CPU designers ran out of ways to make cpu's faster. Previously, there was always some micro-architectural feature waiting to be exploited (say, caches, pipelining, superscalar, OoOE, branch prediction, etc.) that enabled processor designers to utilize the transistors Moore's law gave us in order to increase single-threaded performance. However, it seems that at about the same time we ran into a triple whammy; 1) at about the same time that processor designers ran out of new tricks (with massive payoffs) to pull from their sleeves. 2) existing tricks ran far into diminishing returns 3) transistor scaling wasn't as good as before (the "power wall") tl;dr: We seem to know a lot of tricks that can increase performance a bit, albeit at a heavy cost in power consumption.

We know how to make them faster. How to make faster CPUs viable & affordable to the public though, that's a hard problem to solve.

by thecopy 10y ago

We know how to make them faster. How to make faster CPUs viable & affordable to the public though, that's a hard problem to solve.

RX14 10y ago

Intel essentially has a monopoly on the market for desktop cpus, which can't help.

thecopy 10y ago
Affordable air-cooled x86-CPUs at > 4GHz will disrupt that very quickly.
- k__ 10y ago
  Is x86 still needed? I mean the ARM stuff is getting more traction and maybe it will run around x86 in the next years.
  - wbl 10y ago
    POWER already did by sucking vast amounts of electricity and dumping heat. Getting a high IPC isn't easy and leads to lots of thermal dissapation. Odd arches might make a comeback but don't help much.
jabl 10y ago
If we assume that the economic model of CPU manufacturing is essentially - very large upfront costs in R&D and improved fabs - The marginal cost for each additional CPU manufactured is, in fact, very low Then, isn't this pretty much the textbook example of a natural monopoly? I.e. in such a case, if the market was spread out over more suppliers, would the customer in the end pay more due to the vendors amortizing the R&D costs over fewer units sold? Vs. the current situation where customers are paying monopoly prices to the incumbent vendor.

jabl 10y ago

> We know how to make them faster. Well... Seems the reason for the "multicore revolution" that started around 2005-ish(?) for desktop/x86 server CPU's was largely that CPU designers ran out of ways to make cpu's faster. Previously, there was always some micro-architectural feature waiting to be exploited (say, caches, pipelining, superscalar, OoOE, branch prediction, etc.) that enabled processor designers to utilize the transistors Moore's law gave us in order to increase single-threaded performance. However, it seems that at about the same time we ran into a triple whammy; 1) at about the same time that processor designers ran out of new tricks (with massive payoffs) to pull from their sleeves. 2) existing tricks ran far into diminishing returns 3) transistor scaling wasn't as good as before (the "power wall") tl;dr: We seem to know a lot of tricks that can increase performance a bit, albeit at a heavy cost in power consumption.