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I remember like ~10 years ago on Slashdot some people overclocking to 7-8ghz. Of course this was on single core chips, but we've really pretty much completely s

by tibbon 13y ago

I remember like ~10 years ago on Slashdot some people overclocking to 7-8ghz. Of course this was on single core chips, but we've really pretty much completely stalled on the mhz progression haven't we?

mistercow 13y ago
Clock speed is not a meaningful end unto itself, and that's why it stalled. It was used as a proxy for speed for many years, and this led to its rampant inflation. Instructions per second (IPS) is a more meaningful metric for CPU speed, and that has by no means stalled, even on a per-core basis.
jmngomes 13y ago
Also, I think there are some physical limitations that keep chips below a certain clock speed. Besides, the bet has been on "smarter instead of faster", i.e. producing chips that suit our computing needs, which are more adequately supported by parallel processing. High performance cores are useful for problems that are hard to paralellize, but so far it seems that the breakthrough only occurs when a new approach to the problem makes it feasible on multiprocessing platforms (e.g. graph processing is hard to paralellize due to dependencies among graph nodes, Pregel and similar offer a different approach)...a 50GHz CPU won't save you if you need to process a huge graph (i.e. billions of nodes) on a single thread, it'll always take a lot of time. As to the "record", I think IBM already had a Series Z that is over 5GHz.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I think there are some physical limitations that keep chips below a certain clock speed. Not hard limits, but yes, to my knowledge it is primarily physics that keep chips where they are. The requirements for power and heat dissipation start to balloon.
drzaiusapelord 13y ago
I don't think these are practical limitations, more like limitations to be able to sell laptops and desktops. If we told intel that they could burn up to 350watts on the CPU and a 25lbs heatsink was acceptable, we'd probably have 10ghz processors. Problem is, there isn't a large market for that. Home users don't want a big ugly and noisy box and server buyers would prefer power and heat savings. Supercomputers just tie all this stuff together instead of creating some monster single-core. Actually, this was the strategy with the pentium 4. It was a fast and power hungry single-core. Turns out, efficiency per cycle and multicore are just superior solutions.

by tibbon 13y ago

mistercow 13y ago

Clock speed is not a meaningful end unto itself, and that's why it stalled. It was used as a proxy for speed for many years, and this led to its rampant inflation. Instructions per second (IPS) is a more meaningful metric for CPU speed, and that has by no means stalled, even on a per-core basis.

jmngomes 13y ago

Also, I think there are some physical limitations that keep chips below a certain clock speed. Besides, the bet has been on "smarter instead of faster", i.e. producing chips that suit our computing needs, which are more adequately supported by parallel processing. High performance cores are useful for problems that are hard to paralellize, but so far it seems that the breakthrough only occurs when a new approach to the problem makes it feasible on multiprocessing platforms (e.g. graph processing is hard to paralellize due to dependencies among graph nodes, Pregel and similar offer a different approach)...a 50GHz CPU won't save you if you need to process a huge graph (i.e. billions of nodes) on a single thread, it'll always take a lot of time. As to the "record", I think IBM already had a Series Z that is over 5GHz.

sliverstorm 13y ago
I think there are some physical limitations that keep chips below a certain clock speed. Not hard limits, but yes, to my knowledge it is primarily physics that keep chips where they are. The requirements for power and heat dissipation start to balloon.

drzaiusapelord 13y ago

I don't think these are practical limitations, more like limitations to be able to sell laptops and desktops. If we told intel that they could burn up to 350watts on the CPU and a 25lbs heatsink was acceptable, we'd probably have 10ghz processors. Problem is, there isn't a large market for that. Home users don't want a big ugly and noisy box and server buyers would prefer power and heat savings. Supercomputers just tie all this stuff together instead of creating some monster single-core. Actually, this was the strategy with the pentium 4. It was a fast and power hungry single-core. Turns out, efficiency per cycle and multicore are just superior solutions.