10 ms·

I usually hear the opposite: people tend to underestimate what they can do in 10 years and overestimate what they can do in 1-3

huffmsa 7y ago
People maybe, but institutions and organizations go the other way. Human capital turnover, market trends, butterflies in Thailand all conspire to foil grand organizational visions.
- bhouston 7y ago
  But even if Intel isn't the one to do it, someone will. And given that AMD is just using contract fabs, it means we will have x86-64 chips with these technologies at roughly these times. I wonder if a x86-64 CPU will exceed 1024 cores before the end 2029? It feels like that is where we are headed.
  - dsr_ 7y ago
    Depends on whether there's market demand. If there's something useful about having 32 32-core chiplets connected to an I/O hub talking to a bunch of PCIe5 lanes and a huge pile of DDR6 RAM, that could happen. But getting all that compute logic coordinated in one place might not be that economically desirable compared to offloading to GPU-style specialized parallel processors, or building better coordination software to run distributed systems, or...
    - eloff 7y ago
      Bigger servers just get divided up into more VMs. As long as it's cost effective to scale vertically, it will continue to happen at the cloud platform level.
      - zrm 7y ago
        It'll be interesting to see what these high core count servers do to The Cloud though. Fifteen years ago a lot of medium-sized organizations had a full rack of single and dual-core servers in their offices that cost half a million dollars and consumed >10KW of electricity day and night. That made it attractive to put everything in the cloud -- spend $250K on cloud services instead of $500K on local hardware and you're ahead. But their loads haven't necessarily changed a lot since then, and we're now at the point where you can replace that whole rack with a single one of these high core count beasts with capacity to spare. Then you're back to having the latency and bandwidth of servers on the same LAN as your users instead of having to go out to the internet, not having to pay for bandwidth (on both ends), not having to maintain a separate network infrastructure for The Cloud that uses different systems and interfaces than the ones you use for your offices, etc. People might soon figure out that it's now less expensive to buy one local server once every five years.
        eloff 7y ago
        I think it's always been vastly cheaper for the hardware. But it gets more complex when you look at the TCO. With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. Although now probably everyone is running their own mini cloud with kubernetes, even in the cloud - and that should make it relatively cheap. Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. I'd say always start with the cloud, and you'll know if or when you could do (part) of it cheaper yourself.
        zrm 7y ago
        > With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. That doesn't really change much when the difference is a four figure sum spread over five years. > Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. Would it really take a full time position to maintain two physical servers? That's a day or two for initial installation and configuration which gets amortized over the full lifetime, OS updates managed by the same system you need in any case for the guests, maybe an hour a year if you get a power supply or drive failure. If the maintenance on two physical machines add up to a full week out of the year for the person already maintaining the guests, something has gone terribly wrong. Which itself gets balanced against the time it would take the same person to configure and interact with the cloud vendor's provisioning system -- probably not a huge difference in the time commitment. > And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. Most companies will do about the same business this year as they did last year plus or minus a few percent, so it's really the common case. And if you unexpectedly grow 200% one year then you use some of that unexpected revenue to buy a third server. Where the scalability could really help is if you could grow 200,000% overnight, but that's not really a relevant scenario to your average company operating a shopping mall or a steel mill.
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      > connected to an I/O hub talking to a bunch of PCIe5 lanes and a huge pile of DDR6 RAM So, basically a mainframe on a chip? Honestly, how would that work? Is all that memory coherent? There are a couple of reasons why mainframes cost so much, and some of them are technical. I keep expecting servers to evolve into a multi-CPU non-coherent RAM, but the industry keeps doubling down on coherent RAM¹. At some point servers will turn into a single-board blade hack (that you can mount on a blade hack, piled on a hack), I wonder for how long CPU designers can sustain our current architecture. 1 - Turns out people working full time on the problem have more insight on it than me, go figure.
  - officeplant 7y ago
    The Xeon Phi[1] CPUs were already up to 72c/288t in 2016, if the market demanded it I'm sure Intel could built it, but more than likely the high core counts are a GPU/Compute card's territory until ARM scales it's way up that high. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi
eyegor 7y ago
You might want to check out intels historical roadmaps. They've been missing their own marks since about 2015 iirc.
- jl6 7y ago
  Sounds broadly consistent with the parent poster’s point?
  - SimbaOnSteroids 7y ago
    Not if they meant they missed their 2005 roadmap for 2015.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
      Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. Intel unveiled their infamous "Tick-Tock Model" around 2007 [1]. It went according to plan for all of four years, and then it COMPLETELY fell apart. If anything, I'm willing to bet they KNEW they could hit the first few iterations. I'm guessing for hardware, you've probably got a really good idea if you're going to be able to even manufacture something in two years, let alone mass-distribute, produce, and sell it at the price point you want. I'm also pretty certain they KNEW they wouldn't hit the rest of the roadmap. Honestly, I think it was purposefully misleading investors. I heard from dozens of engineers at the company around 2008 that there was NO WAY they would have 10nm chips around 2012 -- what the roadmap was more or less promising. And surprise, we didn't get them until 2018. Now they're promising 1.5nm in a similar time frame. I'm skeptical. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model
      - ethbro 7y ago
        Big lies seem self-reinforcing, particularly in public companies. Or to put it another way, nobody is going to charge you with a crime for staying with the herd. That's a passive choice. But when there's a dissenting voice, suddenly you have to make an active decision to ignore them. And that's when the lawsuits start producing emails about who knew what when. End result: People intentionally (if they know better) or unintentionally (if people smarter than them are all saying the same thing) agree with the party line, even in the face of demonstrable facts otherwise.
agumonkey 7y ago
Interesting bias indeed. medium term ~ambition versus long term patience
llampx 7y ago
Intel promised 10 Ghz by 2005, if I remember correctly.
- earenndil 7y ago
  Tbf, IPC went up by enough that that effectively happened.
kjaftaedi 7y ago
Processors may get smaller, but the size of dust remains the same. The advances needed to achieve something like this are more in the realm of cleanroom advances than processor architecture.
antpls 7y ago
I actually heard and memorized the opposite : people tend to overestimate what they can do in 10 years (for example, in 1980, some people thought flying cars would be a thing in year 2000) and they underestimate what happens in 1-3 (for example, our smartphones or computers get twice as fast, but the change is so incremental that people don't notice it)

huffmsa 7y ago

People maybe, but institutions and organizations go the other way. Human capital turnover, market trends, butterflies in Thailand all conspire to foil grand organizational visions.

bhouston 7y ago
But even if Intel isn't the one to do it, someone will. And given that AMD is just using contract fabs, it means we will have x86-64 chips with these technologies at roughly these times. I wonder if a x86-64 CPU will exceed 1024 cores before the end 2029? It feels like that is where we are headed.
- dsr_ 7y ago
  Depends on whether there's market demand. If there's something useful about having 32 32-core chiplets connected to an I/O hub talking to a bunch of PCIe5 lanes and a huge pile of DDR6 RAM, that could happen. But getting all that compute logic coordinated in one place might not be that economically desirable compared to offloading to GPU-style specialized parallel processors, or building better coordination software to run distributed systems, or...
  - eloff 7y ago
    Bigger servers just get divided up into more VMs. As long as it's cost effective to scale vertically, it will continue to happen at the cloud platform level.
    - zrm 7y ago
      It'll be interesting to see what these high core count servers do to The Cloud though. Fifteen years ago a lot of medium-sized organizations had a full rack of single and dual-core servers in their offices that cost half a million dollars and consumed >10KW of electricity day and night. That made it attractive to put everything in the cloud -- spend $250K on cloud services instead of $500K on local hardware and you're ahead. But their loads haven't necessarily changed a lot since then, and we're now at the point where you can replace that whole rack with a single one of these high core count beasts with capacity to spare. Then you're back to having the latency and bandwidth of servers on the same LAN as your users instead of having to go out to the internet, not having to pay for bandwidth (on both ends), not having to maintain a separate network infrastructure for The Cloud that uses different systems and interfaces than the ones you use for your offices, etc. People might soon figure out that it's now less expensive to buy one local server once every five years.
      - eloff 7y ago
        I think it's always been vastly cheaper for the hardware. But it gets more complex when you look at the TCO. With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. Although now probably everyone is running their own mini cloud with kubernetes, even in the cloud - and that should make it relatively cheap. Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. I'd say always start with the cloud, and you'll know if or when you could do (part) of it cheaper yourself.
        zrm 7y ago
        > With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. That doesn't really change much when the difference is a four figure sum spread over five years. > Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. Would it really take a full time position to maintain two physical servers? That's a day or two for initial installation and configuration which gets amortized over the full lifetime, OS updates managed by the same system you need in any case for the guests, maybe an hour a year if you get a power supply or drive failure. If the maintenance on two physical machines add up to a full week out of the year for the person already maintaining the guests, something has gone terribly wrong. Which itself gets balanced against the time it would take the same person to configure and interact with the cloud vendor's provisioning system -- probably not a huge difference in the time commitment. > And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. Most companies will do about the same business this year as they did last year plus or minus a few percent, so it's really the common case. And if you unexpectedly grow 200% one year then you use some of that unexpected revenue to buy a third server. Where the scalability could really help is if you could grow 200,000% overnight, but that's not really a relevant scenario to your average company operating a shopping mall or a steel mill.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    > connected to an I/O hub talking to a bunch of PCIe5 lanes and a huge pile of DDR6 RAM So, basically a mainframe on a chip? Honestly, how would that work? Is all that memory coherent? There are a couple of reasons why mainframes cost so much, and some of them are technical. I keep expecting servers to evolve into a multi-CPU non-coherent RAM, but the industry keeps doubling down on coherent RAM¹. At some point servers will turn into a single-board blade hack (that you can mount on a blade hack, piled on a hack), I wonder for how long CPU designers can sustain our current architecture. 1 - Turns out people working full time on the problem have more insight on it than me, go figure.
- officeplant 7y ago
  The Xeon Phi[1] CPUs were already up to 72c/288t in 2016, if the market demanded it I'm sure Intel could built it, but more than likely the high core counts are a GPU/Compute card's territory until ARM scales it's way up that high. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi

eyegor 7y ago

You might want to check out intels historical roadmaps. They've been missing their own marks since about 2015 iirc.

jl6 7y ago
Sounds broadly consistent with the parent poster’s point?
- SimbaOnSteroids 7y ago
  Not if they meant they missed their 2005 roadmap for 2015.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. Intel unveiled their infamous "Tick-Tock Model" around 2007 [1]. It went according to plan for all of four years, and then it COMPLETELY fell apart. If anything, I'm willing to bet they KNEW they could hit the first few iterations. I'm guessing for hardware, you've probably got a really good idea if you're going to be able to even manufacture something in two years, let alone mass-distribute, produce, and sell it at the price point you want. I'm also pretty certain they KNEW they wouldn't hit the rest of the roadmap. Honestly, I think it was purposefully misleading investors. I heard from dozens of engineers at the company around 2008 that there was NO WAY they would have 10nm chips around 2012 -- what the roadmap was more or less promising. And surprise, we didn't get them until 2018. Now they're promising 1.5nm in a similar time frame. I'm skeptical. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model
    - ethbro 7y ago
      Big lies seem self-reinforcing, particularly in public companies. Or to put it another way, nobody is going to charge you with a crime for staying with the herd. That's a passive choice. But when there's a dissenting voice, suddenly you have to make an active decision to ignore them. And that's when the lawsuits start producing emails about who knew what when. End result: People intentionally (if they know better) or unintentionally (if people smarter than them are all saying the same thing) agree with the party line, even in the face of demonstrable facts otherwise.

agumonkey 7y ago

Interesting bias indeed. medium term ~ambition versus long term patience

llampx 7y ago

Intel promised 10 Ghz by 2005, if I remember correctly.

earenndil 7y ago
Tbf, IPC went up by enough that that effectively happened.

kjaftaedi 7y ago

Processors may get smaller, but the size of dust remains the same. The advances needed to achieve something like this are more in the realm of cleanroom advances than processor architecture.

antpls 7y ago

I actually heard and memorized the opposite : people tend to overestimate what they can do in 10 years (for example, in 1980, some people thought flying cars would be a thing in year 2000) and they underestimate what happens in 1-3 (for example, our smartphones or computers get twice as fast, but the change is so incremental that people don't notice it)