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I have a few reasons chip speeds have stalled - Intel has been at the top for too long. - x86 is to complex - nVidia and AMD are being blocked from makin

by jdavid 16y ago

I have a few reasons chip speeds have stalled - Intel has been at the top for too long. - x86 is to complex - nVidia and AMD are being blocked from making x86 chips - PCs pretty much require x86 to exist. moving to graphine might allow for an increase in chip temp, but do you really want a processor running at a few hundred to a thousand degrees? are you willing to pump 200-2k watts into a chip? thank god that we didn't make this mistake with mobile and most platforms use an abstraction level language like c#, java, or javascript. I am personally hoping that data centers really are evaluating ARM chips. The instruction set is smaller, they are lower power, and there are more producers of ARM cores, so prices are much lower. A good intel chip will cost $200-$500, while a chip with an ARM core is probably in the $25-$100 range. How much does a tegra2, A4, or snapdragon cost? I imagine the future of data centers will be arrays of system on chip ARM cores paired with high doses of flash memory. Running your web app off of 1,000 ARM cores might cost you a few thousand a month.

gaylordzach 16y ago
Interesting thought to revert to many inexpensive cores as opposed to virtualising on "super-computers". However I don't think the equation stacks up. ARM is still a long way from offering high processing cores (e.g. no 64Bit). Their whole concept ties perfectly in the mobile world and it's no surprise they are so successful.
- jdavid 16y ago
  As far as I know CUDA is 64bit, and you should be able to run CUDA on tegra2. So, for ARM the only reason to have 64bit is to address large memory, and drive controllers for flash can address the rest. heck if someone really wanted to do an integrated server environment they could put ram behind the drive controller. So having a 32bit core and a 64bit gpu on chip means you can do complex scientific math, but how many web apps really need 64bit floats, ints? In a web world if you needed 64bit, just make a service on a platform that works and either proxy the request or redirect to it. i guess mongodb would suck on a 32bit arm, but that's just because they have a lazy memory manager model. i am sure if arm got big or if someone paid 10gen to fix it, they would. I bet most of the web could work on a large array of high frequency ARM chips. I know that both google is working on it, and I have seen articles on facebook doing it. It's definitely experimental right now, but I think in the next 18 months you will see more public experiments. Mobile chips also have better power management than x86, and can go in to deep sleep and maintain cache really well. Watch this, i know it's going to POP. there is also evidence that nVidia is figuring out it's legal strategy for this. which has an ARM license, and bought transmeta.
Locke1689 16y ago
x86 is to[o] complex If you're going to criticize CISC architectures I would have done it before Intel moved to optimized RISC microcode in implementation. Arguably the greatest advancement in CPU technologies in the past couple years was the addition of hardware virtualization extensions to fulfill the Goldberg requirements. That said, I am biased because I wrote the Intel hardware virtualization layer for an HPC VMM.

by jdavid 16y ago

gaylordzach 16y ago

Interesting thought to revert to many inexpensive cores as opposed to virtualising on "super-computers". However I don't think the equation stacks up. ARM is still a long way from offering high processing cores (e.g. no 64Bit). Their whole concept ties perfectly in the mobile world and it's no surprise they are so successful.

jdavid 16y ago
As far as I know CUDA is 64bit, and you should be able to run CUDA on tegra2. So, for ARM the only reason to have 64bit is to address large memory, and drive controllers for flash can address the rest. heck if someone really wanted to do an integrated server environment they could put ram behind the drive controller. So having a 32bit core and a 64bit gpu on chip means you can do complex scientific math, but how many web apps really need 64bit floats, ints? In a web world if you needed 64bit, just make a service on a platform that works and either proxy the request or redirect to it. i guess mongodb would suck on a 32bit arm, but that's just because they have a lazy memory manager model. i am sure if arm got big or if someone paid 10gen to fix it, they would. I bet most of the web could work on a large array of high frequency ARM chips. I know that both google is working on it, and I have seen articles on facebook doing it. It's definitely experimental right now, but I think in the next 18 months you will see more public experiments. Mobile chips also have better power management than x86, and can go in to deep sleep and maintain cache really well. Watch this, i know it's going to POP. there is also evidence that nVidia is figuring out it's legal strategy for this. which has an ARM license, and bought transmeta.

Locke1689 16y ago

x86 is to[o] complex If you're going to criticize CISC architectures I would have done it before Intel moved to optimized RISC microcode in implementation. Arguably the greatest advancement in CPU technologies in the past couple years was the addition of hardware virtualization extensions to fulfill the Goldberg requirements. That said, I am biased because I wrote the Intel hardware virtualization layer for an HPC VMM.