4 ms·

What will happen when Clock Speeds stop increasing?

21 points by jonnytran 18y ago

MoeDrippins 18y ago
Parallelization + horizontal scaling is my guess. If you can't scale up, scale out.
drinian 18y ago
There will always be new uses for more power, ones that we can't see today. It's silly to say you'd be happy to see that go away. And, yes, I think a lot of the gains in future computing power will be in parallelization, but that wasn't the point of this article.
iigs 18y ago
I agree with the sentiment (wouldn't it be nice to not treat computers, particularly full of nasty chemicals, as items meant to be thrown away every other year). Unfortunately you will find that this isn't the way it works. Manufacturers will keep rebundling the same general parts in slightly different arrangements, with fresh design, and sell it to the disposable-product loving public. Even beyond the core processor, a PC is made up of a ton of little accessories that require drivers, and these are going to keep shifting around for the next couple decades. Linux is arguably better than Windows at supporting old outdated hardware, but good luck finding current OS support for anything but the most popular 1993 (now() - interval 15 year) products in the latest kernels. In my opinion the precedent was set by the auto industry. Sure there are a few people who collect any given type of car and daily drive it 40 years later, but for every one of those there are hundreds of people who keep their old car only as a curiosity (i.e. show car), and for every one of those there are probably hundreds of cars that are trashed and sitting in junkyards or have been recycled into new ones.
- nihilocrat 18y ago
  A more positive way of expressing the sentiment might be "manufacturers will find a way of improving performance, though the gains might be harder to capitalize on than clock speeds or core count". Either way, given that the industry can't survive selling old products, they will find a way of selling us more stuff. We can only hope that we actually get some benefit out of the new products. On the plus side, notice that today, with a computer that is 5 or so years old, you can get on the internet, watch flash video, play music, etc. etc. Compare that to using a 5 year old PC in 2000, or even worse, a 5 year old PC in 1995.
  - DabAsteroid 18y ago
    "manufacturers will find a way of improving performance, though the gains might be harder to capitalize on than clock speeds or core count". Don't count cores out. Intel isn't. http://www.ciol.com/Intel/CP-Intel-CIO-Update/Future-Intel-design-codenamed-Larrabee/8908110053/0/ http://www.ciol.com/Intel/CP-Intel-CIO-Update/Future-Intel-d... Larrabee is expected to kick start an industry-wide effort to create and optimize software for the dozens, hundreds and thousands of cores expected to power future computers.
speek 18y ago
Asynchronous processors will be here soon!
- jfoutz 18y ago
  nope. coders have to figure out threads first. once there's a nice model you can teach a good EE student, we get to use fewer transistors on clocks.
scott_s 18y ago
We haven't had a significant clock speed increase in a while; it's pretty much already happened.
- technoguyrob 18y ago
  Will I ever be able to buy a 10Ghz CPU? Someone please comfort me.
  - jfoutz 18y ago
    No, i don't think so. there are 10ghz transistors, but the're gallium arsenide rather than silicon. I'm going to pretend that i know (i don't), if you try to go much faster than 5ghz with silicon you have to use smaller electron bundles -- lower votage -- because the chips will melt if the voltage is upped to much. because the signal is less clear, undetected/uncorrected errors start happening all the time. remember, at 10ghz 1 in a billion mistakes is terrifying. hugs
    - technoguyrob 18y ago
      And with the recent discovery that graphene nanoribbons may be able to replace silicon as the semiconductor in processors at least one researcher predicts that clock speeds in the terahertz range may be possible.[1] Has anyone ever heard of this or have enough technical background to expound? I am really curious. Either way, I suppose it is far off, certainly not any time soon. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_speed
    - Retric 18y ago
      I thought some of the ALU's where double pumped in p4 and newer cpu's. If that's the case we are already running some part's of the CPU at 3.7 * 2 = 7.2Ghz. Edit: Yea, the integer ALU's operate at twice clock speed. I think the move to 64bit CPU's slowed down the clock speed race as did adding more cores and insane amounts of L2 cache due to heat issues. As a side note when I picked up my quad core CPU at 2.4 GHz it crushed my old 1.8Ghz 32bit cpu so I think they are making some wise tadeoffs due to system buss limitations. Plus the old P4's seemed to trade off a lot of effective for pure clock speed. So after we get back on track we might see a new clock speed race when we have 8 - 32 cores.
zandorg 18y ago
I wrote software that finds textual graphics in a bitmap. I parallelised it by running, say, 4 (or any number of) threads, each handling 1/4 of the bitmap. It works really well, and there's no overlap.
- dangoldin 18y ago
  There must be some overlap to share what they find with another? Let's say 2 of the threads each have half a letter. Do you just have another thread that does the matching?
  - zandorg 18y ago
    Each thread has its area to search. At the end, when the last thread has finished, the results are merged into a single bitmap. The best way to see it is as 4 strips of tracing paper which have the exact same text on, and the strips are searched and the text traced in, then all 4 (clear) strips go in a pile to make the final image. [Edit] To clarify, if you search at position 200,268, if you hit a row of text in the centre, it scans. If you search the same bitmap at 200,350, what you find might not be clear. So each thread searches some of the same areas, but the end result is that all text is found, and heuristics reject certain rows as valid text.
- queensnake 18y ago
  That's called an 'embarrassingly parallel' problem, it's not the general case. I guess, just like 'big O', people have to take a class to appreciate the space of what it's possible to parallelize and how much it buys you.
  - zandorg 18y ago
    At University we used to refer to big O as Roy Orbison. Just an example of our kind of smalltown humour.
ars 18y ago
No more singularity is the most obvious effect. I don't see people talking about this, but the exponential curve broke. Sure you can add cores, but you could do that 5 years ago (or earlier) too - and you don't see AI made even by well funded organizations. It's over - don't wait for it.
- hugh 18y ago
  Relax. Even if we had the hardware today we'd still have no idea how to write passable AI software. By the time somebody figures that out, maybe the hardware will have caught up.
  - Herring 18y ago
    We do know how to write AI, problem is it stops being AI just as soon as we've written it.
- technoguyrob 18y ago
  Maybe that's why the brain decided to go with parallel processing...
- MikeCapone 18y ago
  The exponential curve is for number of transistors on a chip, and for processing power per $1000. That's holding. Mhz has never been exponential afaik.
akeefer 18y ago
The author definitely makes a mistake in equating slow programs with poorly-written programs. Yes, it's true that people who write horrible code often also write horribly non-performant code, and that rushing a product to market without performance testing is far too common in our industry. But in my experience (and I've done a lot of performance tuning), making something perform generally requires selectively damaging the code by making it less understandable and by breaking rules about encapsulation and separation between layers. There's a reason why that whole "premature optimization is the root of all evil" saying is so popular. Performance tuning is also incredibly time-consuming and labor intensive. It might make you feel more hardcore to do it, and it certainly be a useful intellectual exercise, but it's still time that could well be spent on other types of product improvement. The increase in clock speeds has been a primary driver behind the ability of people to use higher-level languages, as well as the ability for people to write larger and more complicated applications. So assuming that a stop to the increase in clockspeeds will lead to better software is flat-out wrong; if anything it'll help to essentially halt certain kinds of progress in language and framework development by preventing people from using higher-level abstractions that don't perform as well.

21 points by jonnytran 18y ago

Parallelization + horizontal scaling is my guess. If you can't scale up, scale out.

There will always be new uses for more power, ones that we can't see today. It's silly to say you'd be happy to see that go away. And, yes, I think a lot of the gains in future computing power will be in parallelization, but that wasn't the point of this article.

iigs 18y ago

I agree with the sentiment (wouldn't it be nice to not treat computers, particularly full of nasty chemicals, as items meant to be thrown away every other year). Unfortunately you will find that this isn't the way it works. Manufacturers will keep rebundling the same general parts in slightly different arrangements, with fresh design, and sell it to the disposable-product loving public. Even beyond the core processor, a PC is made up of a ton of little accessories that require drivers, and these are going to keep shifting around for the next couple decades. Linux is arguably better than Windows at supporting old outdated hardware, but good luck finding current OS support for anything but the most popular 1993 (now() - interval 15 year) products in the latest kernels. In my opinion the precedent was set by the auto industry. Sure there are a few people who collect any given type of car and daily drive it 40 years later, but for every one of those there are hundreds of people who keep their old car only as a curiosity (i.e. show car), and for every one of those there are probably hundreds of cars that are trashed and sitting in junkyards or have been recycled into new ones.

nihilocrat 18y ago
A more positive way of expressing the sentiment might be "manufacturers will find a way of improving performance, though the gains might be harder to capitalize on than clock speeds or core count". Either way, given that the industry can't survive selling old products, they will find a way of selling us more stuff. We can only hope that we actually get some benefit out of the new products. On the plus side, notice that today, with a computer that is 5 or so years old, you can get on the internet, watch flash video, play music, etc. etc. Compare that to using a 5 year old PC in 2000, or even worse, a 5 year old PC in 1995.
- DabAsteroid 18y ago
  "manufacturers will find a way of improving performance, though the gains might be harder to capitalize on than clock speeds or core count". Don't count cores out. Intel isn't. http://www.ciol.com/Intel/CP-Intel-CIO-Update/Future-Intel-design-codenamed-Larrabee/8908110053/0/ http://www.ciol.com/Intel/CP-Intel-CIO-Update/Future-Intel-d... Larrabee is expected to kick start an industry-wide effort to create and optimize software for the dozens, hundreds and thousands of cores expected to power future computers.

speek 18y ago

Asynchronous processors will be here soon!

jfoutz 18y ago
nope. coders have to figure out threads first. once there's a nice model you can teach a good EE student, we get to use fewer transistors on clocks.

scott_s 18y ago

We haven't had a significant clock speed increase in a while; it's pretty much already happened.

technoguyrob 18y ago
Will I ever be able to buy a 10Ghz CPU? Someone please comfort me.
- jfoutz 18y ago
  No, i don't think so. there are 10ghz transistors, but the're gallium arsenide rather than silicon. I'm going to pretend that i know (i don't), if you try to go much faster than 5ghz with silicon you have to use smaller electron bundles -- lower votage -- because the chips will melt if the voltage is upped to much. because the signal is less clear, undetected/uncorrected errors start happening all the time. remember, at 10ghz 1 in a billion mistakes is terrifying. hugs
  - technoguyrob 18y ago
    And with the recent discovery that graphene nanoribbons may be able to replace silicon as the semiconductor in processors at least one researcher predicts that clock speeds in the terahertz range may be possible.[1] Has anyone ever heard of this or have enough technical background to expound? I am really curious. Either way, I suppose it is far off, certainly not any time soon. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_speed
  - Retric 18y ago
    I thought some of the ALU's where double pumped in p4 and newer cpu's. If that's the case we are already running some part's of the CPU at 3.7 * 2 = 7.2Ghz. Edit: Yea, the integer ALU's operate at twice clock speed. I think the move to 64bit CPU's slowed down the clock speed race as did adding more cores and insane amounts of L2 cache due to heat issues. As a side note when I picked up my quad core CPU at 2.4 GHz it crushed my old 1.8Ghz 32bit cpu so I think they are making some wise tadeoffs due to system buss limitations. Plus the old P4's seemed to trade off a lot of effective for pure clock speed. So after we get back on track we might see a new clock speed race when we have 8 - 32 cores.

zandorg 18y ago

I wrote software that finds textual graphics in a bitmap. I parallelised it by running, say, 4 (or any number of) threads, each handling 1/4 of the bitmap. It works really well, and there's no overlap.

dangoldin 18y ago
There must be some overlap to share what they find with another? Let's say 2 of the threads each have half a letter. Do you just have another thread that does the matching?
- zandorg 18y ago
  Each thread has its area to search. At the end, when the last thread has finished, the results are merged into a single bitmap. The best way to see it is as 4 strips of tracing paper which have the exact same text on, and the strips are searched and the text traced in, then all 4 (clear) strips go in a pile to make the final image. [Edit] To clarify, if you search at position 200,268, if you hit a row of text in the centre, it scans. If you search the same bitmap at 200,350, what you find might not be clear. So each thread searches some of the same areas, but the end result is that all text is found, and heuristics reject certain rows as valid text.
queensnake 18y ago
That's called an 'embarrassingly parallel' problem, it's not the general case. I guess, just like 'big O', people have to take a class to appreciate the space of what it's possible to parallelize and how much it buys you.
- zandorg 18y ago
  At University we used to refer to big O as Roy Orbison. Just an example of our kind of smalltown humour.

ars 18y ago

No more singularity is the most obvious effect. I don't see people talking about this, but the exponential curve broke. Sure you can add cores, but you could do that 5 years ago (or earlier) too - and you don't see AI made even by well funded organizations. It's over - don't wait for it.

hugh 18y ago
Relax. Even if we had the hardware today we'd still have no idea how to write passable AI software. By the time somebody figures that out, maybe the hardware will have caught up.
- Herring 18y ago
  We do know how to write AI, problem is it stops being AI just as soon as we've written it.
technoguyrob 18y ago
Maybe that's why the brain decided to go with parallel processing...
MikeCapone 18y ago
The exponential curve is for number of transistors on a chip, and for processing power per $1000. That's holding. Mhz has never been exponential afaik.

akeefer 18y ago

The author definitely makes a mistake in equating slow programs with poorly-written programs. Yes, it's true that people who write horrible code often also write horribly non-performant code, and that rushing a product to market without performance testing is far too common in our industry. But in my experience (and I've done a lot of performance tuning), making something perform generally requires selectively damaging the code by making it less understandable and by breaking rules about encapsulation and separation between layers. There's a reason why that whole "premature optimization is the root of all evil" saying is so popular. Performance tuning is also incredibly time-consuming and labor intensive. It might make you feel more hardcore to do it, and it certainly be a useful intellectual exercise, but it's still time that could well be spent on other types of product improvement. The increase in clock speeds has been a primary driver behind the ability of people to use higher-level languages, as well as the ability for people to write larger and more complicated applications. So assuming that a stop to the increase in clockspeeds will lead to better software is flat-out wrong; if anything it'll help to essentially halt certain kinds of progress in language and framework development by preventing people from using higher-level abstractions that don't perform as well.