5 ms·

> but it's hard to see what 20 or 100 CPUs would do for a laptop. This only if we want to keep the laptop in its current definition: a clunky device requiring

> but it's hard to see what 20 or 100 CPUs would do for a laptop. This only if we want to keep the laptop in its current definition: a clunky device requiring lots of cables and holes in the casing, showing flat image at 4K at best and average quality audio, typing every single letter of a every command to get something done. No useful voice recognition/speech synthesis, no gesture tracking etc. Specialized (sub)systems (media, wireless, smart networking) already use dozens of CPUs. Having generic CPUs to do the same work is not currently justified, mostly because of power and memory consumption. As these will go down, generic CPUs will assume more and more specialized tasks, because they are always easier to program, and probably cheaper to use overall (licenses, software and hardware tooling etc) Thinking about it, 20 CPUs in a laptop seems like a minimum to me.

pjc50 10y ago
Typing is faster and more accurate than voice recognition. The advantage of voice is hands-free operation. The laptop has been somewhat eroded by tablets and hybrids like the Microsoft Surface, but until we get rollup screens the form factor of 10"-17" portable screen with keyboard will continue to exist.
- minipci1321 10y ago
  I'd think students listening to a teacher in a auditorium, would appreciate voice recognition, if done with sufficient quality, much more than typing. For me personally it always was either listening/understanding or taking notes.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Possibly, although there are some people who believe that the act of taking notes helps retention. Certainly you'd still have to review the transcript to deal with all the uhming and sidetracking of a live speaker. Mind you, I'm old enough that I took all my lecture notes longhand. I'd love to see a dictation system cope with maths notation. (Thinking back, 20 years ago I went to a lecture on the subject of "what on earth will we do with >4Gb of RAM"...)
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Was one of the options "launch a text chat program called slack and chrome with 3 tabs on websites with movie advertisements"?
      - jerf 10y ago
        In a sense, yes, probably. It is not a new idea that programs will grow to fit all available resources, I'm pretty sure it had been observed by at least the 1970s: http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Laws/2511_laws-of-computer-programming-1-any-given-program-when-running-is-obsolete.html http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Laws/2511_laws-of-computer-pro... That reference isn't dated, but I can't seem to find a dated one because it's just the sort of ambient humor that floated around for a long time and got embedded into fortune files and such. Search for that and you find it all over, unattributed.
- phkahler 10y ago
  >> The advantage of voice is hands-free operation. No, the advantage of voice is natural language queries. Imagine the following: "<computer name> open the file I was working on yesterday." "<CN>Find the email from Bob with the attached document on system requirements." "<CN>Open the calendar and see when I can schedule a meeting with Alice and Jane." "<CN>Find the picture of <wife> in front of a waterfall from our trip up north." This requires smart apps that accumulate meta-data about your files and activities. That data then enables natural language communication with the machine, and that is what's needed to make voice recognition worth while. But with all the pieces I think you'll find it very rewarding. I've often imagined a photo-realistic office assistant in a small window off in the corner that speaks and understands and takes care of things like this. It may seem like a gimmick but that's because nobody has done it correctly yet.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    I too would welcome general AI, but fear we'll just be stuck with a verbal Microsoft paperclip.
coldtea 10y ago
>No useful voice recognition/speech synthesis, no gesture tracking etc. Those are gimmicks anyway. Unless incapacitated for some reason, nobody wants to talk to their programs -- except if it is combined with very advanced/strong AI to just utter some command and have them figure out all the rest (try talking out aloud for an hour for e.g. writing a post -- it gets old very soon). Making gestures in the air even less so, unless you want to switch on the lights (e.g. something you do very rare) or play a gesture tracking game to get fit. Those Minority Report style UIs is something that goods look in movies, but is not a good idea in practice (just like the translucent glass monitors they use in those movies. What's the idea there, who thought that, outside of a HUD, it makes sense to have anybody/anything on the other side of the glass compete with the on-screen data for your attention?). >a clunky device requiring lots of cables and holes in the casing, showing flat image at 4K at best and average quality audio, typing every single letter of a every command to get something done. No useful voice recognition/speech synthesis, no gesture tracking etc. You make the pinnacle of modern technology sound bad. Perhaps born quite recently and lacking some context? Some of the sneer doesn't even make sense. "4K at best" -- the eye has a certain physiology, and for a laptop screen that's 15 or even 17 inches beyond 4K is marginal returns (and after that, no returns at all). And "average quality audio"? Not sure what you have in mind, but audio in laptops is constrained by the speakers, not by the soundcard or CPU. It's trivial to have a great DAC in a laptop that can do 192Khz/24bit that's better than what a human can hear (or even tolerate: 24bit dynamic range allows for building-crushing audio).
- minipci1321 10y ago
  Trying to give a short reply, so think about two use cases: a) laptop as a back-end for complex measurement system. Connected to a high-voltage signal, sitting in a crowded labs full of noise and cables. Would you like to reach out to type in a command every time, if you can speak or gesture instead? b) laptop put next to a rendering device (video, audio, whatever), close enough so a wide-band wireless becomes efficient. Would you like to have all rendering devices perform the same computation, closed-sourced, paid-licensing, full of non-addressed CVEs? Or you'd rather concentrate the same processing in one place -- your laptop -- source code open to public inspection etc?
Dylan16807 10y ago
> This only if we want to keep the laptop in its current definition: a clunky device requiring lots of cables and holes in the casing, showing flat image at 4K at best and average quality audio, typing every single letter of a every command to get something done. No useful voice recognition/speech synthesis, no gesture tracking etc. Laptops can be roughly the size of a screen and a battery, and very sleek. They can do all power and I/O through a single USB-C cable. Laptops can do 3D, and if you find a screen that's better than 4K they can do that too. The only real limit is that it's fundamentally one screen, which is pretty minor. Laptops can have great audio. They can do voice recognition and speech synthesis. They can do gesture tracking. And doing all those at the same time only requires a couple processors.
- minipci1321 10y ago
  > And doing all those at the same time only requires a couple processors. A couple of general-purpose CPU cores you mean? How about: at least one CPU in WiFi subsystem, another in the Gigabit Ethernet card, another as high-speed interface host controller, video subsystem probably several (8K resolution / stereo, decoding + transcoding + (de)watermarking + error concealment + post processing), audio one or more (Dolby Volume, spatial sound), demodulation + demuxing of container formats at high speed at least one more maybe? My point is really -- laptop should be able to do all that great stuff you enumerated, and more yet, all at the same time. As data volumes and our expectations grow, and Moore law comes to end, more cores will be needed, and I say there will be work for more of them than just 4 or 8.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Wifi might have a core to handle various things, but you could probably already do that on the main CPU. Ethernet adapters don't need processing, they need specialized transceiver circuits attached to ram. Deciding what to display is already done on a GPU that's almost entirely generic processor. Feeding that to the hardware takes special circuitry and doesn't need any real processing. Audio processing is almost always done on the main CPU already. I expect more cores to be used in the future, but all the things you mentioned are either already handled on the main cores, or take utterly trivial amounts of processing. They can all be handled on couple cores. They won't be what pushes growth.

pjc50 10y ago

Typing is faster and more accurate than voice recognition. The advantage of voice is hands-free operation. The laptop has been somewhat eroded by tablets and hybrids like the Microsoft Surface, but until we get rollup screens the form factor of 10"-17" portable screen with keyboard will continue to exist.

minipci1321 10y ago
I'd think students listening to a teacher in a auditorium, would appreciate voice recognition, if done with sufficient quality, much more than typing. For me personally it always was either listening/understanding or taking notes.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Possibly, although there are some people who believe that the act of taking notes helps retention. Certainly you'd still have to review the transcript to deal with all the uhming and sidetracking of a live speaker. Mind you, I'm old enough that I took all my lecture notes longhand. I'd love to see a dictation system cope with maths notation. (Thinking back, 20 years ago I went to a lecture on the subject of "what on earth will we do with >4Gb of RAM"...)
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Was one of the options "launch a text chat program called slack and chrome with 3 tabs on websites with movie advertisements"?
    - jerf 10y ago
      In a sense, yes, probably. It is not a new idea that programs will grow to fit all available resources, I'm pretty sure it had been observed by at least the 1970s: http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Laws/2511_laws-of-computer-programming-1-any-given-program-when-running-is-obsolete.html http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Laws/2511_laws-of-computer-pro... That reference isn't dated, but I can't seem to find a dated one because it's just the sort of ambient humor that floated around for a long time and got embedded into fortune files and such. Search for that and you find it all over, unattributed.
phkahler 10y ago
>> The advantage of voice is hands-free operation. No, the advantage of voice is natural language queries. Imagine the following: "<computer name> open the file I was working on yesterday." "<CN>Find the email from Bob with the attached document on system requirements." "<CN>Open the calendar and see when I can schedule a meeting with Alice and Jane." "<CN>Find the picture of <wife> in front of a waterfall from our trip up north." This requires smart apps that accumulate meta-data about your files and activities. That data then enables natural language communication with the machine, and that is what's needed to make voice recognition worth while. But with all the pieces I think you'll find it very rewarding. I've often imagined a photo-realistic office assistant in a small window off in the corner that speaks and understands and takes care of things like this. It may seem like a gimmick but that's because nobody has done it correctly yet.
- pjc50 10y ago
  I too would welcome general AI, but fear we'll just be stuck with a verbal Microsoft paperclip.

coldtea 10y ago

>No useful voice recognition/speech synthesis, no gesture tracking etc. Those are gimmicks anyway. Unless incapacitated for some reason, nobody wants to talk to their programs -- except if it is combined with very advanced/strong AI to just utter some command and have them figure out all the rest (try talking out aloud for an hour for e.g. writing a post -- it gets old very soon). Making gestures in the air even less so, unless you want to switch on the lights (e.g. something you do very rare) or play a gesture tracking game to get fit. Those Minority Report style UIs is something that goods look in movies, but is not a good idea in practice (just like the translucent glass monitors they use in those movies. What's the idea there, who thought that, outside of a HUD, it makes sense to have anybody/anything on the other side of the glass compete with the on-screen data for your attention?). >a clunky device requiring lots of cables and holes in the casing, showing flat image at 4K at best and average quality audio, typing every single letter of a every command to get something done. No useful voice recognition/speech synthesis, no gesture tracking etc. You make the pinnacle of modern technology sound bad. Perhaps born quite recently and lacking some context? Some of the sneer doesn't even make sense. "4K at best" -- the eye has a certain physiology, and for a laptop screen that's 15 or even 17 inches beyond 4K is marginal returns (and after that, no returns at all). And "average quality audio"? Not sure what you have in mind, but audio in laptops is constrained by the speakers, not by the soundcard or CPU. It's trivial to have a great DAC in a laptop that can do 192Khz/24bit that's better than what a human can hear (or even tolerate: 24bit dynamic range allows for building-crushing audio).

minipci1321 10y ago
Trying to give a short reply, so think about two use cases: a) laptop as a back-end for complex measurement system. Connected to a high-voltage signal, sitting in a crowded labs full of noise and cables. Would you like to reach out to type in a command every time, if you can speak or gesture instead? b) laptop put next to a rendering device (video, audio, whatever), close enough so a wide-band wireless becomes efficient. Would you like to have all rendering devices perform the same computation, closed-sourced, paid-licensing, full of non-addressed CVEs? Or you'd rather concentrate the same processing in one place -- your laptop -- source code open to public inspection etc?

Dylan16807 10y ago

> This only if we want to keep the laptop in its current definition: a clunky device requiring lots of cables and holes in the casing, showing flat image at 4K at best and average quality audio, typing every single letter of a every command to get something done. No useful voice recognition/speech synthesis, no gesture tracking etc. Laptops can be roughly the size of a screen and a battery, and very sleek. They can do all power and I/O through a single USB-C cable. Laptops can do 3D, and if you find a screen that's better than 4K they can do that too. The only real limit is that it's fundamentally one screen, which is pretty minor. Laptops can have great audio. They can do voice recognition and speech synthesis. They can do gesture tracking. And doing all those at the same time only requires a couple processors.

minipci1321 10y ago
> And doing all those at the same time only requires a couple processors. A couple of general-purpose CPU cores you mean? How about: at least one CPU in WiFi subsystem, another in the Gigabit Ethernet card, another as high-speed interface host controller, video subsystem probably several (8K resolution / stereo, decoding + transcoding + (de)watermarking + error concealment + post processing), audio one or more (Dolby Volume, spatial sound), demodulation + demuxing of container formats at high speed at least one more maybe? My point is really -- laptop should be able to do all that great stuff you enumerated, and more yet, all at the same time. As data volumes and our expectations grow, and Moore law comes to end, more cores will be needed, and I say there will be work for more of them than just 4 or 8.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Wifi might have a core to handle various things, but you could probably already do that on the main CPU. Ethernet adapters don't need processing, they need specialized transceiver circuits attached to ram. Deciding what to display is already done on a GPU that's almost entirely generic processor. Feeding that to the hardware takes special circuitry and doesn't need any real processing. Audio processing is almost always done on the main CPU already. I expect more cores to be used in the future, but all the things you mentioned are either already handled on the main cores, or take utterly trivial amounts of processing. They can all be handled on couple cores. They won't be what pushes growth.