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10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

278 points by cft 10y ago

kevin2r 10y ago
So, what was the reason CPUs could not scale vertically (higher frequency)? Temperature? Stability?
- gaze 10y ago
  If I understand correctly, Intel CPUs around that time were super deeply pipelined so you could meet timing closure at such high frequencies. So yeah you can keep pushing the clock-speeds up and up but now a mispredicted branch really shoots you in the foot. Makes sense at the time because people associated clock speed directly with performance. Higher frequency more better. Intel kinda gave up on that at some point and started over with the core architecture design which has a lower clock speed but does more each pipeline stage.
  - monocasa 10y ago
    Haha, yeah P4 had multiple pipeline stages just for propagation delay.
  - largote 10y ago
    Those very deep pipelines are the reason NetBurst was very good at some tasks but not so great for general use. They made branching mispredictions be really expensive as a pipeline flush would result in a large number (~20 IIRC) cycles to be "wasted".
- dzhiurgis 10y ago
  Not enough time for electrons to move. Photons - another story.
  - aisofteng 10y ago
    This comment makes no sense. Neither electrons nor photons are what move through wires to propagate electrical signals.
    - gaze 10y ago
      I'd definitely say electrons propagate through wires to carry signals. The electrons charge the gates on the fets which opens or closes the channel, which allows electrons to flow through another wire. I wouldn't say it's terribly explanatory tho
      - kushan2020 10y ago
        Well that is not correct @gaze. Although your light turns on very quickly when you flip the switch, and you find it impossible to flip off the light and get in bed before the room goes dark, the actual drift velocity of electrons through copper wires is very slow. It is the change or "signal" which propagates along wires at essentially the speed of light. refer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_velocity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_velocity
        deleted 10y ago
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        jimbert 10y ago
        The fact that drift velocity is nonzero means that electrons are indeed moving as @gaze says.
        deleted 10y ago
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        gaze 10y ago
        Electrons are always moving, at the fermi velocity.
        gaze 10y ago
        What do you mean? Electrons move near the fermi velocity.
- monocasa 10y ago
  > Temperature? Stability? Yes. Notice how after it was clear that P4 was a dead end they went and dusted off their P3 mobile line that they had been making more power efficient the whole time?
- iamaaditya 10y ago
  Technically it was heat but mostly it was due to (i) Economics, there was less demand for faster clock speed. Otherwise more research could have gone towards solving heat problem. (ii) Each cycle of CPU was more efficient with ability to execute multiple instructions in a single cycle and with more efficient instruction sets. Surprisingly, power consumption also made huge impact. As tablets and laptops got more popular than desktop battery life became a major concern and thus TDP played major role in research. Try this fun experiment: Underclock your CPU by half a GHz and see if you notice the difference in your day to day work.
  - monocasa 10y ago
    > Otherwise more research could have gone towards solving heat problem. (ii) Each cycle of CPU was more efficient with ability to execute multiple instructions in a single cycle and with more efficient instruction sets. Dude, Intel spends something like $80B/yr on R&D. This is closer to hitting fundamental laws of physics barriers. They killed off their P4 line and developed their mobile line for a reason.
    - kashkhan 10y ago
      the $80B a year in R&D is off by an order of magnitude. https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/05/intel-corporation-struggles-to-rein-in-spending-as.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/05/intel-corporation-...
      - knowaveragejoe 10y ago
        Indeed, that's more than Intel earned in total revenues in 2016...
      - ma2rten 10y ago
        Isn't an order of magnitude 10x? According to your link they spent $12.74 billion in 2016.
        slededit 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago
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- camus2 10y ago
  heat mainly and the shift toward mobile devices which implies good autonomy and power efficiency.
- adt2bt 10y ago
  Mostly heat dissipation. Assuming you hold voltage constant, heat increases linearly with frequency. Also, as process nodes get smaller, you increase the # of transistors per square inch, so a jump to a new node can also increase heat generation quadratically if all else stays constant. As other commenters mentioned, you can counteract this with better cooling, but eventually the marginal $/watt of cooling isn't worth the tradeoff of lower speeds & multicore processors.
- DontGiveTwoFlux 10y ago
  Each switch of a gate causes energy to be expended. When a transistor switches, there is some current flowing and some voltage across the source and sink. That voltage * current is greater than zero, and therefore requires power. This is opposed to the stable non-switching state where there is no current and therefore no power. So, because each switch consumes the same amount of power, the power consumed is directly proportional to the switching frequency. Double the frequency = double the power. As other posters have alluded, Intel tried to work on the power issue by decreasing the voltage. Unfortunately, they were not able to figure out how to decrease the voltage as they had in the past. With the high power required to run high frequency circuits, cooling would have been more of a problem than could be overcome economically.
  - baq 10y ago
    it's even worse - transistors require more voltage to reliably switch at higher frequencies, e.g. http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/22nm/powersm.jpg http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/22nm/powersm.j...
    - kec 10y ago
      And to get even more pedantic, it's even worse than that alone implies because switching power increases with the square of voltage. We're also at the point where transistor leakage current matters. All transistors leak a tiny amount of current even without switching. Alone this might only be a few µA, but pack enough of them together on a die and that might add up to hundreds of mA. Combine that with higher voltages so the chip can run at high clock speeds, and the fact that leakage increases with temperature (which will be driven by higher voltages and frequencies), and all of a sudden you have a feedback loop which can cause you to burn a few extra Watts before you've even done anything.
- deleted 10y ago
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- inlineint 10y ago
  There is also another fundamental limit, the speed of light. Because of the special relativity theory nothing including electrical current can transmit information faster than the speed of light (c = 3*10^10 cm/s). So if maximum size dimension of your CPU is say 2cm (I'm ignoring that they actually can have multiple smaller cores), then the maximum physically achievable frequency is upper bounded by size/c = 15 GHz. Although it has not been reached yet, it has the same order of magnitude as the record frequencies achieved by overclockers using liquid nitrogen cooling (something a little below 9 GHz). Also it shows that reducing transistor size and as a consequence overall CPU size increases maximum physically allowed frequency.
  - unixhero 10y ago
    Thank you for your synaptic sugar this morning. It saved an incredibly boring meeting during a long track implementation project.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    It's very easy to design a CPU such that signals do not have to cross it in one cycle. The speed of light is unlikely to ever cap the speed of a CMOS processor.
- phoenix3200 10y ago
  They were scaling vertically because the GHz game was a marketing strategy and not an engineering strategy. But when the pipeline got so deep that it didn't make sense (branch misses would incur huge penalties) and AMD stole the spotlight, marketing finally gave way for the engineers.
sontakey 10y ago
Well, where can I get mine?
ChristianGeek 10y ago
Well, this would be less then, wouldn't it?
- deleted 10y ago
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wapz 10y ago
> Realistically speaking, we should be able to see NetBurst based processors reach somewhere between 8 – 10GHz in the next five years before the architecture is replaced yet again was a statement made by anandtech. Did Intel actually strive for those numbers?
- cft 10y ago
  Yes, click at the link at the bottom right of the article (Next) http://www.anandtech.com/show/680/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/680/7
  - wapz 10y ago
    Whoops thank you! I guess I have to look for the rest of the article next time.
- gregoryrueda 10y ago
  Haven't we reached the point of diminishing returns regarding processor speed? I believe this to be true for the consumer market.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
    Why would that be the case? If we could run CPUs at 50Ghz with no problems why wouldn't we? Edit: I probably exaggerate. I just mean that higher clock speed still have benefits.
    - Zombieball 10y ago
      I think this "conveyor example" from Intel is a good explanation as to why: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/02/19/why-has-cpu-frequency-ceased-to-grow https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/02/19/why-has-cp... I think that you would cease to see any acceleration from increased clock speed unless you also sped up other parts of the processor / computer. I think your sentiment is correct. If we can take advantage of higher clock speeds, then why not do it?
wmf 10y ago
Article says: Obviously this 8 – 10GHz clock range would be based on Intel’s 0.07-micron process that is forecasted to debut in 2005. These processors will run at less than 1 volt, 0.85v being the current estimate. Intel introduced a 65 nm (0.065 micron) process in 2006. The "Cedar Mill" Pentium 4 processor ran at 3.6 GHz at a whopping 1.3V although a small double-pumped part of the processor ran at 7.2 GHz. It could be overclocked to 4.5/9.0 GHz at 1.4V. The discrepancy between 0.85V and 1.3V was caused by the end of Dennard scaling. Basically transistors require much more voltage than predicted and thus consume far more power than predicted. Although the transistors can technically run at 9 GHz, the resulting power density is very difficult to cool.
- yuhong 10y ago
  The fun thing is that they were reducing the power with each stepping by that time.
- kristianp 10y ago
  It appears that the double-pumped adds aren't used any more. I thought they would have been good to keep, Adds being so common.
  - Tuna-Fish 10y ago
    They are not used because with transistors that keep getting smaller but that don't get much faster, it's better to just have more add units in parallel than it is to run the ones you have faster. A modern Intel CPU effectively has 4 add units to the 2 of the P4.
- ZeljkoS 10y ago
  Yes, more about the end of Dennard scaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Breakdown_of_Dennard_scaling_around_2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Breakdown_of_D...
- amelius 10y ago
  > Although the transistors can technically run at 9 GHz, the resulting power density is very difficult to cool. But nowadays we have processors with multiple cores, where sometimes you need only 1 core (and it needs to be fast). So would it be an idea to increase clock frequency for those cores, but multiplex them quickly to allow them to cool?
malikNF 10y ago
Slightly off topic, this reminded me of the whole over-clocking scene in the 2000's, being excited over these things. :) http://valid.canardpc.com/records.php http://valid.canardpc.com/records.php https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKN4VMOenNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKN4VMOenNM (the world record at 8.429GHz)
Strom 10y ago
It's interesting that while we aren't at 10 GHz quite yet, the functionality that was mentioned in the article [1][2] is here and works even on budget smartphones. -- [1] Imagine being able to speak normally with your computer as you would a secretary sitting next to you and have your computer accurately and quickly take notes from your speech. [2] Imagine logging onto your computer not via a user name and a password but by sitting in front of your display and having it scan your face to figure out if you are allowed access to the computer.
- flukus 10y ago
  The functionality existed on desktop computers at the time, so it's not really a prediction.
  - Strom 10y ago
    I certainly don't remember anything of usable quality being available to end-users. My Windows 98 machine could barely play 360p videos and didn't even have a camera. The voice recognition that I do remember trying was of very low accuracy. Do you remember any specifics of where & how exactly these features were available?
    - flukus 10y ago
      Not sure about the software but webcams were available from the early 90's. I think there was an old amiga magazine that came with some facial recognition demo ware. For voice there were things like dragon that could do reasonably accurate full voice dictation. IME it was more accurate the google voice is today because it was trained. Moving these to the cloud is more about controlling data than it is about lack of local computing power.
    - WillPostForFood 10y ago
      We had people in the office in the late 90s with repetitive stress issues who were using Dragon NaturallySpeaking pretty effectively.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
The funny part is I'm reading this article almost 2 decades later, on a CPU that's probably throttling itself down to the 1.4 ghz level... the top of the line then.
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago
  And yet, it's probably over a factor 10 faster and a factor 10 more efficient. (random numbers, I don't actually know how cpus have scaled or if they can accurately be compared)
dottrap 10y ago
I'm surprised Intel made this bold claim so late. When I was in college in the late 90's, my computer architecture prof said the physics problems get really hard starting around 4 to 8 Ghz. He said it as it was common knowledge in the industry.
- rconti 10y ago
  Damn. The linked article says nothing about Intel claiming 10ghz, and the author is just speculating that, applying a 9x speed increase to Netburst (the same 9x they saw with the P6), 10ghz should be doable. But then the link at the bottom, "FACTS FROM INTEL" specifically mentions 10ghz, presumably from the horse's mouth.
- hvidgaard 10y ago
  Marketing people write statements like this. They don't ask for conservative estimates.
NamTaf 10y ago
I remember reading this news (and perhaps even this exact article - it certainly feels familiar) back when it was released and being so excited as a 15 year old gaming nerd. It really was a time when stuff was changing so rapidly - and those changes were resulting in massive, really obvious performance gains - that you couldn't help but just look forward to where it might go if the pace continued. Everything was about the big frequency numbers and it was easy to buy into the hype. It'd be interesting to know the sort of IPC delta between a Netburst architecture and Kaby Lake. Also, it'd be interesting to know how theoretically fast you'd have to push Netburst to see the same performance as Kaby Lake.
- dr_zoidberg 10y ago
  This is from 2011, but it should give you an idea: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-benchmark,2974-15.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-b... . tl;dr: Core i7-2600k @ 3GHz, is about 2,67x faster than a Pentium 4 HT 660 (Prescott ua) @ 3Ghz. In the benchmark they tested single core, and equal clock, to keep everything as level as posible. As for single core performance, Kaby Lake would be between 30 to 40% better than Sandy Bridge (which could be called the peak improvement architecture in the Core i brand), so it'd be about ~3,5x faster than the Prescott based chips.
Jedd 10y ago
My first computer ran at a touch over 1MHz, and I've had a lifetime of needing (sic) to upgrade my computer every couple of years to chase or improve upon the same perceived performance levels. It's refreshing that -- despite not having 10GHz CPU's available -- my 6yo CPU/mobo still does not feel in any way slow or in need of upgrade. Yes, other components have offset the relatively slow pace of CPU improvements (GPU's for gamers, SSD's for everyone, etc) but it feels like we're enjoying a lengthy era of 'good enough grunt' on the CPU front (for most of us).
- qball 10y ago
  >6yo CPU/mobo still does not feel in any way slow or in need of upgrade The limiting factors have changed- or rather, the limiting computers have changed. Throwing more client horsepower or internet speed at the problem can't solve the fact that the server (and to a limited extent, an internet connection) has to deliver both a huge amount of JavaScript and the (typically image/video/audio-heavy) content itself. The client is always underutilized- the fact that smartphone apps (or rather, cached local copies of what would normally be a website) have similar performance to a modern desktop PC should speak volumes about that. It's probably why Microsoft smartphone-ized Windows; though their execution of that was awful and it didn't help that WinRT wasn't mature on release. And raw server performance (like desktop performance) has been at a plateau for a while now as well. The lack of competition for Intel doesn't help that (maybe AMD's new processor line will start driving improvements again, but there are no hard numbers on performance; and higher-TDP ARM designs aren't currently competitive with Intel's in this space either). Until this changes, and there's nothing to indicate it will on Intel's roadmaps, clients will continue to be good enough- it might be the first time in history where computers (since 2008 or so) are replaced because the hardware failed and not because they were insufficiently fast.
  - Jedd 10y ago
    You make some good points -- and to be candid, I didn't touch on the network effect(s) because I was trying to maintain some brevity / focus in my original post. Aside -- I grew up in the days before network reliance (or even network presence) consequently I don't think of my 32GB / 8 core / 8TB / 32" monitored computer as an enhanced VT52. :) Though I certainly respect the fact that for many people, once you exceed the grunt required to render HTTP(S) at an acceptable speed, there's no great interest in a faster computer. Your observations on Intel -- is it possible they were a bit more prescient than we typically give them credit for, insofar as not pursuing ever faster CPU's (which would now have been considered relatively unnecessary for the majority of installations)?
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
Anecdotally, I've heard that Everquest 2 (released 2004) is still impossible to run at 60FPS with all graphical settings maxed; the devs attempted to future-proof it with speculative high-end graphics options, but they optimized for high-GHz processors which never arrived.
- untoreh 10y ago
  I would argue no mmo ever made has ever truly run at 60fps but that's another story I guess :p
- rangibaby 10y ago
  No single GPU could run Crysis (2007) at 1080p / 60fps until last year!
- brianwawok 10y ago
  And it looked not that good. For the time it was fine, but it hasn't aged that well. Guess that is a good sign against future proofing your game?
antognini 10y ago
Just to give a little intuition for exactly how fast your CPU runs (assuming ~3 GHz), a single cycle takes about as much time as it takes a photon to travel from your monitor to your eyeball.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  That's helpful. How many football fields is that?
  - foldor 10y ago
    I'm partial to Olympic sized swimming pools myself.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Yards or Meters?
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  299,792,458 meters/second ÷ 3,000,000,000/second = 9.99 cm Just how close are you sitting to your monitor?
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - antognini 10y ago
    Perhaps I need glasses. :)
- n00b101 10y ago
  That's only true if your monitor is 4 inches away from your face.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Ah yes, the 10Ghz CPU. Now if you run 6 cores at 2.5Ghz each[1] is the 15Ghz? By the end of 2001 it was clear that Intel really needed to rethink things. And ever since that time we've had a series of "linear projections" which have come up short (process nodes, power levels, cpu power). Not to say we don't have some pretty awesome toys to play with that can do a lot more than machines of a decade ago could do, but every time someone takes an exponential and extends it out into the future to make a point, I stop and ask "And what if this is the end of this s-curve?" Nature hates an exponential almost as much as she hates vacuums :-) [1] https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Xeon-2620-Processor-BX80621E52620/dp/B007H29ECE https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Xeon-2620-Processor-BX80621E526...
- elastic_church 10y ago
  lol, I remember trying to explain those things, during the multi-core console wars. turns out, flirting with women is more fulfilling than that after all
- redcalx 10y ago
  There's an argument that when the current s-curve (sigmoid) starts to reach its limit we start looking for other ways of obtaining improvements, such that over time we have a series of sigmoids and overall exponential progress... until the final sigmoid. It reminds me of Malthus thinking the economy/world was doomed because we were about to run out of trees, and then we started making significant use of coal (coal had been used for a long time, but only on a small scale).
aristidb 10y ago
I see three main failed predictions: - 10 GHz - long pipelines, I think we're currently at around 14 stages, which is more than P6 but less than Netburst (Pentium 4) - EUV lithography is still not a thing at 10 nm Die I miss any important failed predictions?
taylorh140 10y ago
Intel can't beat the heat.
wisienkas 10y ago
It is about having vision really. Appreciate their vision from back then, and embrace what they have achieved so far
wscott 10y ago
Glad to see the correct answer at the top here. The "fireball" section of the P4 did run at double the frequency as the rest of the processor. So internally that was considered the processor frequency. One of my first contributions to the Linux kernel was a bugfix to the bogomips routine. It stored the result in a 32-bit variable and our 8+ GHz chilled test machines would cause that to wrap. It was then determined that the processor would be marketed using the slow clock frequency. This was the right answer, but it didn't feel like it at the time. That article predates the marketing change. It might have made them realized they needed that change.
userbinator 10y ago
Over a decade later, even overclockers haven't managed to reach 10GHz --- but some have come close: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fx-8150-overclock-9ghz-bulldozer,15853.html http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fx-8150-overclock-9ghz-... At 10GHz, light travels approximately 3cm between each period of the clock. Note that transistors which operate above 10GHz are not rare and used in microwave applications; as I understand it, the difficulty is in creating logic circuits with them and at a scale suitable for a CPU.
- bhouston 10y ago
  > 10GHz, light travels approximately 3cm between each period of the clock Light doesn't change speed, so this statement confuses me.
  - chriswarbo 10y ago
    10GHz is the clock frequency, not the light frequency ;)
  - acomar 10y ago
    The frequency is what's changing. How far does light travel in 1/10,000,000,000 of a second?
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - mbell 10y ago
    > Light doesn't change speed, so this statement confuses me. Practically speaking, it does change speed. The speed of light in a vacuum is fixed, but it varies based on what it's traveling through. The propagation velocity of an EM signal in RG coax cable is 80% of c*, PCB traces can be as low as 50% and somewhat surprisingly both fiber optic cable and cat6 cable are about the same, ~60-70%. I don't know if there is any good public information about the velocity factor with modern CPU transmission lines.
  - deleted 10y ago
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jlebrech 10y ago
I've always wondered why the need for ghz, isn't mips what you're looking for. wouldn't a 50mhz 1000 core cpu do well with decent parallelism in a compiler? how many cycles does the average method/function/procedure need anyway?
- mox1 10y ago
  The main problem is that generic parallelism is hard, and doesn't give you a straight X multiple speed up[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing#Amdahl.27s_law_and_Gustafson.27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing#Amdahl.27s_...
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  The standard response is to quote Amdahl's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law If 90% of your runtime can be done in parallel, you still have to wait for that last 10%. You can hit this limit with 10 cores (1 processing the 10% that's serial, the other 9 processing the 90% in parallel). If you throw 1000 cores at the problem, you'll have 999 cores processing the 90% in parallel, each performing 0.09% of the workload, but you'll still have 1 core doing the 10% that's serial. Those 999 cores will be idle for 99% of the time, waiting for that last core to finish. The counter-argument is Gustafson's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law This says that people don't choose a particular task, then wait for a computer to do it. Instead, the choice of which task to perform depends on what the computer can manage. Hence the user of a 1000 core machine will choose to do different tasks than the user of a 10 core machine, or a 1 core machine. Whilst Gustafson's Law is clear from experience (a PlayStation 4 isn't used to run Pacman really fast), Amdahl's Law is the one that's relevant for compilers: a "sufficiently smart compiler" can alter your code in all sorts of ways, but the resulting executable must still perform the same task (otherwise it's a bug!). There might be an approach based on e.g. writing an abstract specification and deriving a program which is suitable for the given hardware, but that's a long way off (for non-trivial tasks, at least).
willholloway 10y ago
The current generation of Intel chips can be overclocked comfortably to 5ghz with a simple water cooling setup.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  You only have to risk frying your computer and destroying your data if the water cooler springs a leak.
richardboegli 10y ago
Best so far is 8.7Ghz with AMD chip which is a bit old now. But Kaby Lake is 7.3Ghz. All using liquid nitrogen of course. http://valid.canardpc.com/records.php#js-freq_all http://valid.canardpc.com/records.php#js-freq_all
moogly 10y ago
Interesting. One day, maybe one day, Intel will release a desktop processor that is worth upgrading to from my 6 year old 2600K. One that doesn't cost $1723, that is.
- Zachery 10y ago
  Define worth? They have released a process that is worth upgrading to: https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_50-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Pro... https://ark.intel.com/products/52214/Intel-Core-i7-2600K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/52214/Intel-Core-i7-2600K-Pro... There are a massive host of improvements between those two processors. Each release since Sandy Bridge has continued to increase performance between 5 to 10% in most tasks and more in some specifics. Over 4 releases that is a noticeable effect. That processor in the US is 350 Dollars.
pmoriarty 10y ago
What ever happened to quantum computing, DNA computing, and optical computing? Are consumers ever going to see a general purpose computer based on any of those technologies on their desktops?
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  > Quantum computing Still gradually in development, presumably coming someday. It's very difficult to get quantum systems of any real complexity to not decohere before they can do useful computation. > DNA computing DNA-based storage apparently exists in the lab and might exist someday: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/microsoft-experiments-with-dna-storage-1000000000-tb-in-a-gram/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/micros.... Current costs are something like $40 million/GB, so that'll have to come down "a bit". I don't know of anyone doing computation with DNA, biology seems too slow for that. > Optical computing It's very difficult to make light interact with other light (which is sine qua non for computation) except inside a material with electrons, where you get significant losses and there's no real advantage over just plain old transistors. Not likely to become a useful technology IMO.
ksec 10y ago
We may have to move beyond Silicon to get 10Ghz. For General Purpose IPC Single threaded performance, we basically had little to no improvement since Sandy Bridge apart from Clock Speed. SSD / IO Speed helped to fill the performance improvement gap in the past 4 - 5 years. Now we are waiting for the next big improvement to come. If there are any.

278 points by cft 10y ago

kevin2r 10y ago

So, what was the reason CPUs could not scale vertically (higher frequency)? Temperature? Stability?

gaze 10y ago
If I understand correctly, Intel CPUs around that time were super deeply pipelined so you could meet timing closure at such high frequencies. So yeah you can keep pushing the clock-speeds up and up but now a mispredicted branch really shoots you in the foot. Makes sense at the time because people associated clock speed directly with performance. Higher frequency more better. Intel kinda gave up on that at some point and started over with the core architecture design which has a lower clock speed but does more each pipeline stage.
- monocasa 10y ago
  Haha, yeah P4 had multiple pipeline stages just for propagation delay.
- largote 10y ago
  Those very deep pipelines are the reason NetBurst was very good at some tasks but not so great for general use. They made branching mispredictions be really expensive as a pipeline flush would result in a large number (~20 IIRC) cycles to be "wasted".
dzhiurgis 10y ago
Not enough time for electrons to move. Photons - another story.
- aisofteng 10y ago
  This comment makes no sense. Neither electrons nor photons are what move through wires to propagate electrical signals.
  - gaze 10y ago
    I'd definitely say electrons propagate through wires to carry signals. The electrons charge the gates on the fets which opens or closes the channel, which allows electrons to flow through another wire. I wouldn't say it's terribly explanatory tho
    - kushan2020 10y ago
      Well that is not correct @gaze. Although your light turns on very quickly when you flip the switch, and you find it impossible to flip off the light and get in bed before the room goes dark, the actual drift velocity of electrons through copper wires is very slow. It is the change or "signal" which propagates along wires at essentially the speed of light. refer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_velocity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_velocity
      - deleted 10y ago
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      - jimbert 10y ago
        The fact that drift velocity is nonzero means that electrons are indeed moving as @gaze says.
        deleted 10y ago
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        gaze 10y ago
        Electrons are always moving, at the fermi velocity.
      - gaze 10y ago
        What do you mean? Electrons move near the fermi velocity.
monocasa 10y ago
> Temperature? Stability? Yes. Notice how after it was clear that P4 was a dead end they went and dusted off their P3 mobile line that they had been making more power efficient the whole time?
iamaaditya 10y ago
Technically it was heat but mostly it was due to (i) Economics, there was less demand for faster clock speed. Otherwise more research could have gone towards solving heat problem. (ii) Each cycle of CPU was more efficient with ability to execute multiple instructions in a single cycle and with more efficient instruction sets. Surprisingly, power consumption also made huge impact. As tablets and laptops got more popular than desktop battery life became a major concern and thus TDP played major role in research. Try this fun experiment: Underclock your CPU by half a GHz and see if you notice the difference in your day to day work.
- monocasa 10y ago
  > Otherwise more research could have gone towards solving heat problem. (ii) Each cycle of CPU was more efficient with ability to execute multiple instructions in a single cycle and with more efficient instruction sets. Dude, Intel spends something like $80B/yr on R&D. This is closer to hitting fundamental laws of physics barriers. They killed off their P4 line and developed their mobile line for a reason.
  - kashkhan 10y ago
    the $80B a year in R&D is off by an order of magnitude. https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/05/intel-corporation-struggles-to-rein-in-spending-as.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/05/intel-corporation-...
    - knowaveragejoe 10y ago
      Indeed, that's more than Intel earned in total revenues in 2016...
    - ma2rten 10y ago
      Isn't an order of magnitude 10x? According to your link they spent $12.74 billion in 2016.
      - slededit 10y ago
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camus2 10y ago
heat mainly and the shift toward mobile devices which implies good autonomy and power efficiency.
adt2bt 10y ago
Mostly heat dissipation. Assuming you hold voltage constant, heat increases linearly with frequency. Also, as process nodes get smaller, you increase the # of transistors per square inch, so a jump to a new node can also increase heat generation quadratically if all else stays constant. As other commenters mentioned, you can counteract this with better cooling, but eventually the marginal $/watt of cooling isn't worth the tradeoff of lower speeds & multicore processors.
DontGiveTwoFlux 10y ago
Each switch of a gate causes energy to be expended. When a transistor switches, there is some current flowing and some voltage across the source and sink. That voltage * current is greater than zero, and therefore requires power. This is opposed to the stable non-switching state where there is no current and therefore no power. So, because each switch consumes the same amount of power, the power consumed is directly proportional to the switching frequency. Double the frequency = double the power. As other posters have alluded, Intel tried to work on the power issue by decreasing the voltage. Unfortunately, they were not able to figure out how to decrease the voltage as they had in the past. With the high power required to run high frequency circuits, cooling would have been more of a problem than could be overcome economically.
- baq 10y ago
  it's even worse - transistors require more voltage to reliably switch at higher frequencies, e.g. http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/22nm/powersm.jpg http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/22nm/powersm.j...
  - kec 10y ago
    And to get even more pedantic, it's even worse than that alone implies because switching power increases with the square of voltage. We're also at the point where transistor leakage current matters. All transistors leak a tiny amount of current even without switching. Alone this might only be a few µA, but pack enough of them together on a die and that might add up to hundreds of mA. Combine that with higher voltages so the chip can run at high clock speeds, and the fact that leakage increases with temperature (which will be driven by higher voltages and frequencies), and all of a sudden you have a feedback loop which can cause you to burn a few extra Watts before you've even done anything.
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inlineint 10y ago
There is also another fundamental limit, the speed of light. Because of the special relativity theory nothing including electrical current can transmit information faster than the speed of light (c = 3*10^10 cm/s). So if maximum size dimension of your CPU is say 2cm (I'm ignoring that they actually can have multiple smaller cores), then the maximum physically achievable frequency is upper bounded by size/c = 15 GHz. Although it has not been reached yet, it has the same order of magnitude as the record frequencies achieved by overclockers using liquid nitrogen cooling (something a little below 9 GHz). Also it shows that reducing transistor size and as a consequence overall CPU size increases maximum physically allowed frequency.
- unixhero 10y ago
  Thank you for your synaptic sugar this morning. It saved an incredibly boring meeting during a long track implementation project.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  It's very easy to design a CPU such that signals do not have to cross it in one cycle. The speed of light is unlikely to ever cap the speed of a CMOS processor.
phoenix3200 10y ago
They were scaling vertically because the GHz game was a marketing strategy and not an engineering strategy. But when the pipeline got so deep that it didn't make sense (branch misses would incur huge penalties) and AMD stole the spotlight, marketing finally gave way for the engineers.

sontakey 10y ago

Well, where can I get mine?

ChristianGeek 10y ago

Well, this would be less then, wouldn't it?

deleted 10y ago
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wapz 10y ago

> Realistically speaking, we should be able to see NetBurst based processors reach somewhere between 8 – 10GHz in the next five years before the architecture is replaced yet again was a statement made by anandtech. Did Intel actually strive for those numbers?

cft 10y ago
Yes, click at the link at the bottom right of the article (Next) http://www.anandtech.com/show/680/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/680/7
- wapz 10y ago
  Whoops thank you! I guess I have to look for the rest of the article next time.
gregoryrueda 10y ago
Haven't we reached the point of diminishing returns regarding processor speed? I believe this to be true for the consumer market.
- 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
  Why would that be the case? If we could run CPUs at 50Ghz with no problems why wouldn't we? Edit: I probably exaggerate. I just mean that higher clock speed still have benefits.
  - Zombieball 10y ago
    I think this "conveyor example" from Intel is a good explanation as to why: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/02/19/why-has-cpu-frequency-ceased-to-grow https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/02/19/why-has-cp... I think that you would cease to see any acceleration from increased clock speed unless you also sped up other parts of the processor / computer. I think your sentiment is correct. If we can take advantage of higher clock speeds, then why not do it?

wmf 10y ago

Article says: Obviously this 8 – 10GHz clock range would be based on Intel’s 0.07-micron process that is forecasted to debut in 2005. These processors will run at less than 1 volt, 0.85v being the current estimate. Intel introduced a 65 nm (0.065 micron) process in 2006. The "Cedar Mill" Pentium 4 processor ran at 3.6 GHz at a whopping 1.3V although a small double-pumped part of the processor ran at 7.2 GHz. It could be overclocked to 4.5/9.0 GHz at 1.4V. The discrepancy between 0.85V and 1.3V was caused by the end of Dennard scaling. Basically transistors require much more voltage than predicted and thus consume far more power than predicted. Although the transistors can technically run at 9 GHz, the resulting power density is very difficult to cool.

yuhong 10y ago
The fun thing is that they were reducing the power with each stepping by that time.
kristianp 10y ago
It appears that the double-pumped adds aren't used any more. I thought they would have been good to keep, Adds being so common.
- Tuna-Fish 10y ago
  They are not used because with transistors that keep getting smaller but that don't get much faster, it's better to just have more add units in parallel than it is to run the ones you have faster. A modern Intel CPU effectively has 4 add units to the 2 of the P4.
ZeljkoS 10y ago
Yes, more about the end of Dennard scaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Breakdown_of_Dennard_scaling_around_2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Breakdown_of_D...
amelius 10y ago
> Although the transistors can technically run at 9 GHz, the resulting power density is very difficult to cool. But nowadays we have processors with multiple cores, where sometimes you need only 1 core (and it needs to be fast). So would it be an idea to increase clock frequency for those cores, but multiplex them quickly to allow them to cool?

malikNF 10y ago

Slightly off topic, this reminded me of the whole over-clocking scene in the 2000's, being excited over these things. :) http://valid.canardpc.com/records.php http://valid.canardpc.com/records.php https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKN4VMOenNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKN4VMOenNM (the world record at 8.429GHz)

Strom 10y ago

It's interesting that while we aren't at 10 GHz quite yet, the functionality that was mentioned in the article [1][2] is here and works even on budget smartphones. -- [1] Imagine being able to speak normally with your computer as you would a secretary sitting next to you and have your computer accurately and quickly take notes from your speech. [2] Imagine logging onto your computer not via a user name and a password but by sitting in front of your display and having it scan your face to figure out if you are allowed access to the computer.

flukus 10y ago
The functionality existed on desktop computers at the time, so it's not really a prediction.
- Strom 10y ago
  I certainly don't remember anything of usable quality being available to end-users. My Windows 98 machine could barely play 360p videos and didn't even have a camera. The voice recognition that I do remember trying was of very low accuracy. Do you remember any specifics of where & how exactly these features were available?
  - flukus 10y ago
    Not sure about the software but webcams were available from the early 90's. I think there was an old amiga magazine that came with some facial recognition demo ware. For voice there were things like dragon that could do reasonably accurate full voice dictation. IME it was more accurate the google voice is today because it was trained. Moving these to the cloud is more about controlling data than it is about lack of local computing power.
  - WillPostForFood 10y ago
    We had people in the office in the late 90s with repetitive stress issues who were using Dragon NaturallySpeaking pretty effectively.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

The funny part is I'm reading this article almost 2 decades later, on a CPU that's probably throttling itself down to the 1.4 ghz level... the top of the line then.

Cthulhu_ 10y ago
And yet, it's probably over a factor 10 faster and a factor 10 more efficient. (random numbers, I don't actually know how cpus have scaled or if they can accurately be compared)

dottrap 10y ago

I'm surprised Intel made this bold claim so late. When I was in college in the late 90's, my computer architecture prof said the physics problems get really hard starting around 4 to 8 Ghz. He said it as it was common knowledge in the industry.

rconti 10y ago
Damn. The linked article says nothing about Intel claiming 10ghz, and the author is just speculating that, applying a 9x speed increase to Netburst (the same 9x they saw with the P6), 10ghz should be doable. But then the link at the bottom, "FACTS FROM INTEL" specifically mentions 10ghz, presumably from the horse's mouth.
hvidgaard 10y ago
Marketing people write statements like this. They don't ask for conservative estimates.

NamTaf 10y ago

I remember reading this news (and perhaps even this exact article - it certainly feels familiar) back when it was released and being so excited as a 15 year old gaming nerd. It really was a time when stuff was changing so rapidly - and those changes were resulting in massive, really obvious performance gains - that you couldn't help but just look forward to where it might go if the pace continued. Everything was about the big frequency numbers and it was easy to buy into the hype. It'd be interesting to know the sort of IPC delta between a Netburst architecture and Kaby Lake. Also, it'd be interesting to know how theoretically fast you'd have to push Netburst to see the same performance as Kaby Lake.

dr_zoidberg 10y ago
This is from 2011, but it should give you an idea: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-benchmark,2974-15.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-b... . tl;dr: Core i7-2600k @ 3GHz, is about 2,67x faster than a Pentium 4 HT 660 (Prescott ua) @ 3Ghz. In the benchmark they tested single core, and equal clock, to keep everything as level as posible. As for single core performance, Kaby Lake would be between 30 to 40% better than Sandy Bridge (which could be called the peak improvement architecture in the Core i brand), so it'd be about ~3,5x faster than the Prescott based chips.

Jedd 10y ago

My first computer ran at a touch over 1MHz, and I've had a lifetime of needing (sic) to upgrade my computer every couple of years to chase or improve upon the same perceived performance levels. It's refreshing that -- despite not having 10GHz CPU's available -- my 6yo CPU/mobo still does not feel in any way slow or in need of upgrade. Yes, other components have offset the relatively slow pace of CPU improvements (GPU's for gamers, SSD's for everyone, etc) but it feels like we're enjoying a lengthy era of 'good enough grunt' on the CPU front (for most of us).

qball 10y ago
>6yo CPU/mobo still does not feel in any way slow or in need of upgrade The limiting factors have changed- or rather, the limiting computers have changed. Throwing more client horsepower or internet speed at the problem can't solve the fact that the server (and to a limited extent, an internet connection) has to deliver both a huge amount of JavaScript and the (typically image/video/audio-heavy) content itself. The client is always underutilized- the fact that smartphone apps (or rather, cached local copies of what would normally be a website) have similar performance to a modern desktop PC should speak volumes about that. It's probably why Microsoft smartphone-ized Windows; though their execution of that was awful and it didn't help that WinRT wasn't mature on release. And raw server performance (like desktop performance) has been at a plateau for a while now as well. The lack of competition for Intel doesn't help that (maybe AMD's new processor line will start driving improvements again, but there are no hard numbers on performance; and higher-TDP ARM designs aren't currently competitive with Intel's in this space either). Until this changes, and there's nothing to indicate it will on Intel's roadmaps, clients will continue to be good enough- it might be the first time in history where computers (since 2008 or so) are replaced because the hardware failed and not because they were insufficiently fast.
- Jedd 10y ago
  You make some good points -- and to be candid, I didn't touch on the network effect(s) because I was trying to maintain some brevity / focus in my original post. Aside -- I grew up in the days before network reliance (or even network presence) consequently I don't think of my 32GB / 8 core / 8TB / 32" monitored computer as an enhanced VT52. :) Though I certainly respect the fact that for many people, once you exceed the grunt required to render HTTP(S) at an acceptable speed, there's no great interest in a faster computer. Your observations on Intel -- is it possible they were a bit more prescient than we typically give them credit for, insofar as not pursuing ever faster CPU's (which would now have been considered relatively unnecessary for the majority of installations)?

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

Anecdotally, I've heard that Everquest 2 (released 2004) is still impossible to run at 60FPS with all graphical settings maxed; the devs attempted to future-proof it with speculative high-end graphics options, but they optimized for high-GHz processors which never arrived.

untoreh 10y ago
I would argue no mmo ever made has ever truly run at 60fps but that's another story I guess :p
rangibaby 10y ago
No single GPU could run Crysis (2007) at 1080p / 60fps until last year!
brianwawok 10y ago
And it looked not that good. For the time it was fine, but it hasn't aged that well. Guess that is a good sign against future proofing your game?

antognini 10y ago

Just to give a little intuition for exactly how fast your CPU runs (assuming ~3 GHz), a single cycle takes about as much time as it takes a photon to travel from your monitor to your eyeball.

brianwawok 10y ago
That's helpful. How many football fields is that?
- foldor 10y ago
  I'm partial to Olympic sized swimming pools myself.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Yards or Meters?
theandrewbailey 10y ago
299,792,458 meters/second ÷ 3,000,000,000/second = 9.99 cm Just how close are you sitting to your monitor?
- deleted 10y ago
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- antognini 10y ago
  Perhaps I need glasses. :)
n00b101 10y ago
That's only true if your monitor is 4 inches away from your face.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Ah yes, the 10Ghz CPU. Now if you run 6 cores at 2.5Ghz each[1] is the 15Ghz? By the end of 2001 it was clear that Intel really needed to rethink things. And ever since that time we've had a series of "linear projections" which have come up short (process nodes, power levels, cpu power). Not to say we don't have some pretty awesome toys to play with that can do a lot more than machines of a decade ago could do, but every time someone takes an exponential and extends it out into the future to make a point, I stop and ask "And what if this is the end of this s-curve?" Nature hates an exponential almost as much as she hates vacuums :-) [1] https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Xeon-2620-Processor-BX80621E52620/dp/B007H29ECE https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Xeon-2620-Processor-BX80621E526...

elastic_church 10y ago
lol, I remember trying to explain those things, during the multi-core console wars. turns out, flirting with women is more fulfilling than that after all
redcalx 10y ago
There's an argument that when the current s-curve (sigmoid) starts to reach its limit we start looking for other ways of obtaining improvements, such that over time we have a series of sigmoids and overall exponential progress... until the final sigmoid. It reminds me of Malthus thinking the economy/world was doomed because we were about to run out of trees, and then we started making significant use of coal (coal had been used for a long time, but only on a small scale).

aristidb 10y ago

I see three main failed predictions: - 10 GHz - long pipelines, I think we're currently at around 14 stages, which is more than P6 but less than Netburst (Pentium 4) - EUV lithography is still not a thing at 10 nm Die I miss any important failed predictions?

taylorh140 10y ago

Intel can't beat the heat.

wisienkas 10y ago

It is about having vision really. Appreciate their vision from back then, and embrace what they have achieved so far

wscott 10y ago

Glad to see the correct answer at the top here. The "fireball" section of the P4 did run at double the frequency as the rest of the processor. So internally that was considered the processor frequency. One of my first contributions to the Linux kernel was a bugfix to the bogomips routine. It stored the result in a 32-bit variable and our 8+ GHz chilled test machines would cause that to wrap. It was then determined that the processor would be marketed using the slow clock frequency. This was the right answer, but it didn't feel like it at the time. That article predates the marketing change. It might have made them realized they needed that change.

userbinator 10y ago

Over a decade later, even overclockers haven't managed to reach 10GHz --- but some have come close: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fx-8150-overclock-9ghz-bulldozer,15853.html http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fx-8150-overclock-9ghz-... At 10GHz, light travels approximately 3cm between each period of the clock. Note that transistors which operate above 10GHz are not rare and used in microwave applications; as I understand it, the difficulty is in creating logic circuits with them and at a scale suitable for a CPU.

bhouston 10y ago
> 10GHz, light travels approximately 3cm between each period of the clock Light doesn't change speed, so this statement confuses me.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  10GHz is the clock frequency, not the light frequency ;)
- acomar 10y ago
  The frequency is what's changing. How far does light travel in 1/10,000,000,000 of a second?
- deleted 10y ago
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- mbell 10y ago
  > Light doesn't change speed, so this statement confuses me. Practically speaking, it does change speed. The speed of light in a vacuum is fixed, but it varies based on what it's traveling through. The propagation velocity of an EM signal in RG coax cable is 80% of c*, PCB traces can be as low as 50% and somewhat surprisingly both fiber optic cable and cat6 cable are about the same, ~60-70%. I don't know if there is any good public information about the velocity factor with modern CPU transmission lines.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

jlebrech 10y ago

I've always wondered why the need for ghz, isn't mips what you're looking for. wouldn't a 50mhz 1000 core cpu do well with decent parallelism in a compiler? how many cycles does the average method/function/procedure need anyway?

mox1 10y ago
The main problem is that generic parallelism is hard, and doesn't give you a straight X multiple speed up[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing#Amdahl.27s_law_and_Gustafson.27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing#Amdahl.27s_...
chriswarbo 10y ago
The standard response is to quote Amdahl's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law If 90% of your runtime can be done in parallel, you still have to wait for that last 10%. You can hit this limit with 10 cores (1 processing the 10% that's serial, the other 9 processing the 90% in parallel). If you throw 1000 cores at the problem, you'll have 999 cores processing the 90% in parallel, each performing 0.09% of the workload, but you'll still have 1 core doing the 10% that's serial. Those 999 cores will be idle for 99% of the time, waiting for that last core to finish. The counter-argument is Gustafson's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law This says that people don't choose a particular task, then wait for a computer to do it. Instead, the choice of which task to perform depends on what the computer can manage. Hence the user of a 1000 core machine will choose to do different tasks than the user of a 10 core machine, or a 1 core machine. Whilst Gustafson's Law is clear from experience (a PlayStation 4 isn't used to run Pacman really fast), Amdahl's Law is the one that's relevant for compilers: a "sufficiently smart compiler" can alter your code in all sorts of ways, but the resulting executable must still perform the same task (otherwise it's a bug!). There might be an approach based on e.g. writing an abstract specification and deriving a program which is suitable for the given hardware, but that's a long way off (for non-trivial tasks, at least).

willholloway 10y ago

The current generation of Intel chips can be overclocked comfortably to 5ghz with a simple water cooling setup.

pmoriarty 10y ago
You only have to risk frying your computer and destroying your data if the water cooler springs a leak.

richardboegli 10y ago

Best so far is 8.7Ghz with AMD chip which is a bit old now. But Kaby Lake is 7.3Ghz. All using liquid nitrogen of course. http://valid.canardpc.com/records.php#js-freq_all http://valid.canardpc.com/records.php#js-freq_all

moogly 10y ago

Interesting. One day, maybe one day, Intel will release a desktop processor that is worth upgrading to from my 6 year old 2600K. One that doesn't cost $1723, that is.

Zachery 10y ago
Define worth? They have released a process that is worth upgrading to: https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_50-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Pro... https://ark.intel.com/products/52214/Intel-Core-i7-2600K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/52214/Intel-Core-i7-2600K-Pro... There are a massive host of improvements between those two processors. Each release since Sandy Bridge has continued to increase performance between 5 to 10% in most tasks and more in some specifics. Over 4 releases that is a noticeable effect. That processor in the US is 350 Dollars.

pmoriarty 10y ago

What ever happened to quantum computing, DNA computing, and optical computing? Are consumers ever going to see a general purpose computer based on any of those technologies on their desktops?

Analemma_ 10y ago
> Quantum computing Still gradually in development, presumably coming someday. It's very difficult to get quantum systems of any real complexity to not decohere before they can do useful computation. > DNA computing DNA-based storage apparently exists in the lab and might exist someday: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/microsoft-experiments-with-dna-storage-1000000000-tb-in-a-gram/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/micros.... Current costs are something like $40 million/GB, so that'll have to come down "a bit". I don't know of anyone doing computation with DNA, biology seems too slow for that. > Optical computing It's very difficult to make light interact with other light (which is sine qua non for computation) except inside a material with electrons, where you get significant losses and there's no real advantage over just plain old transistors. Not likely to become a useful technology IMO.

ksec 10y ago

We may have to move beyond Silicon to get 10Ghz. For General Purpose IPC Single threaded performance, we basically had little to no improvement since Sandy Bridge apart from Clock Speed. SSD / IO Speed helped to fill the performance improvement gap in the past 4 - 5 years. Now we are waiting for the next big improvement to come. If there are any.