5 ms·

This immediately reminded me of when Intel predicted 10GHz processors by 2011 back in 2000 http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/intel-predicts-10ghz-chips-by-201

This immediately reminded me of when Intel predicted 10GHz processors by 2011 back in 2000 http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/intel-predicts-10ghz-chips-by-2011-20000726/ http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/intel-predicts-10ghz-chip... Increasingly lower energy computing is obviously happening, but there are lower bounds to how little power you need for a useful device, it would seem. Wireless networking will always require a reasonable amount of power to achieve any reasonable distance/reliability.

viseztrance 14y ago
Awesome link. The first comment is priceless.
- xhrpost 14y ago
  The rest of the comments are as well, especially everyone's predictions for what they'll see in 10 years in computing. Quite interesting looking back in time of roughly a computer century and seeing the viewpoints we had back then.
- cobrausn 14y ago
  The point is, within ten years, we won't be using silicon-based computers. They'll be made obsolete by DNA/protein type bio-computers or maybe molecular computers. - by MonkeyMan Do we geeks always sound this sure of ourselves when we're dead wrong?
  - Avshalom 14y ago
    Yes we do, but this feels extra-wrong/possibly-a-joke because I don't remember any actual research into-- or any reason besides the future to believe in-- "bio-computers" or "molecular computers" in '00.
swalsh 14y ago
Wow, those comments make people from the year 2000 seem like terrible people... I like how the article references moores law, which I guess is supposed to be the doubling of transitors... this is predicting a doubling in clock speed.
- derekp7 14y ago
  Even better yet is the Starfire movie made by Sun Microsystems in 1993. I'm still waiting for my desk that is a display and scanner. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0 Edit: I found my link the source page, with a longer downloadable version and "director's cut" of the film: http://www.asktog.com/starfire/ http://www.asktog.com/starfire/
lukeschlather 14y ago
Do we not have 10ghz processors? My impression is that they exist, or you can at least overclock to that level, it's just neither reliable nor economical, and real workloads that require that much horsepower can by and large be parallelized, so the difference between quad-core 3.5 ghz and 10ghz is mostly academic.
- ajross 14y ago
  We have 10GHz digital logic for sure (Thunderbolt drives its differential lines that fast, I believe). You can do that for a small region of a chip with a handful of transistors. But you can't run a whole 50+ mm^2 die at that speed for the simple reason that it can't be cooled by non-exotic methods. You just can't get the heat out fast enough, so you can't ship the product. So for now, with ambient temperature cooling, the best modern chips top out at about 5GHz. That will likely improve slowly with each process generation due to efficiency improvements, but it's not going to change much.
  - Daniel_Newby 14y ago
    If you can run a quad-core chip at 3 GHz, then there it is almost certainly feasible to run one core at 10 GHz. I suspect the real limit is in the size of the L1 and predecode caches. I expect they are limited by propagation delay, not transistor speed. The only way to get more cache is to use more cores.
    - ajross 14y ago
      Heat transfer doesn't scale quite like that. Once the surface area gets beyond "tiny subcircuit" you're limited by the essentially 1D transfer "up" through the packaging and can't rely on the ability of the cooler silicon in the surrounding regions. One core is still a really big circuit. And yes, caches are big regions and hard to make faster synchronously. But you can treat this with pipelining -- that's one reason even the 32k L1 data cache in SNB/IVB has a 4 cycle (!) latency. Note that the even the gargantuan L3 cache on these chips (which is literally 1/3 of the die area) is still running at full speed, just with a ~30 cycle latency.
mbell 14y ago
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." -Amara's Law

viseztrance 14y ago

Awesome link. The first comment is priceless.

xhrpost 14y ago
The rest of the comments are as well, especially everyone's predictions for what they'll see in 10 years in computing. Quite interesting looking back in time of roughly a computer century and seeing the viewpoints we had back then.
cobrausn 14y ago
The point is, within ten years, we won't be using silicon-based computers. They'll be made obsolete by DNA/protein type bio-computers or maybe molecular computers. - by MonkeyMan Do we geeks always sound this sure of ourselves when we're dead wrong?
- Avshalom 14y ago
  Yes we do, but this feels extra-wrong/possibly-a-joke because I don't remember any actual research into-- or any reason besides the future to believe in-- "bio-computers" or "molecular computers" in '00.

swalsh 14y ago

Wow, those comments make people from the year 2000 seem like terrible people... I like how the article references moores law, which I guess is supposed to be the doubling of transitors... this is predicting a doubling in clock speed.

derekp7 14y ago
Even better yet is the Starfire movie made by Sun Microsystems in 1993. I'm still waiting for my desk that is a display and scanner. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0 Edit: I found my link the source page, with a longer downloadable version and "director's cut" of the film: http://www.asktog.com/starfire/ http://www.asktog.com/starfire/

lukeschlather 14y ago

Do we not have 10ghz processors? My impression is that they exist, or you can at least overclock to that level, it's just neither reliable nor economical, and real workloads that require that much horsepower can by and large be parallelized, so the difference between quad-core 3.5 ghz and 10ghz is mostly academic.

ajross 14y ago
We have 10GHz digital logic for sure (Thunderbolt drives its differential lines that fast, I believe). You can do that for a small region of a chip with a handful of transistors. But you can't run a whole 50+ mm^2 die at that speed for the simple reason that it can't be cooled by non-exotic methods. You just can't get the heat out fast enough, so you can't ship the product. So for now, with ambient temperature cooling, the best modern chips top out at about 5GHz. That will likely improve slowly with each process generation due to efficiency improvements, but it's not going to change much.
- Daniel_Newby 14y ago
  If you can run a quad-core chip at 3 GHz, then there it is almost certainly feasible to run one core at 10 GHz. I suspect the real limit is in the size of the L1 and predecode caches. I expect they are limited by propagation delay, not transistor speed. The only way to get more cache is to use more cores.
  - ajross 14y ago
    Heat transfer doesn't scale quite like that. Once the surface area gets beyond "tiny subcircuit" you're limited by the essentially 1D transfer "up" through the packaging and can't rely on the ability of the cooler silicon in the surrounding regions. One core is still a really big circuit. And yes, caches are big regions and hard to make faster synchronously. But you can treat this with pipelining -- that's one reason even the 32k L1 data cache in SNB/IVB has a 4 cycle (!) latency. Note that the even the gargantuan L3 cache on these chips (which is literally 1/3 of the die area) is still running at full speed, just with a ~30 cycle latency.

mbell 14y ago

"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." -Amara's Law