8 ms·

Assuming Moore's Law is slowing down, and there's no rabbit about to be pulled out of a hat by Intel or others, it's going to close the gap significantly betwee

• richardwhiuk 12y ago
  Definitely agree about the quality of Hennessey and Patterson's Computer Architecture book. I think the reason that the 32nm, 22nm and 14nm chips are identical from a consumer approach is because of two issues. One is marketing - we no longer have convincing benchmarks that are as persuasive as the GHz a chip would support. It was a questionable metric anyway, but it now isn't being pursued (for a whole number of reasons). The second is an application space problem - consumer applications are no longer exploiting CPU improvements in the same manner. That's partially because we now get more parallelism rather than single threaded speed, but it's partial a testament to the success of the previous generation as to the breadth of tasks a current PC will happily perform in a reasonable time frame.
  • pjmlp 12y ago
    Yes, the time to update the computer every three years to keep up with the progress is now gone. Maybe when we finally get to quantum computers a similar cycle will happen, but to the dismay of OEMs the cycle is gone. Even mobiles already reached the same peak and are mostly driven by contract renewals nowadays, not features.
    • XorNot 12y ago
      Disagree on the causes. We're limited by mobile energy storage. Desktops are as powerful as anyone needs - largely because you just buy the appropriate size - at least at the consumer level. Laptops, phones? Definitely not. But the push for more isn't being limited by our performance, it's being limited by energy demands. I'm shopping for a new laptop at the moment, and my overriding requirement is to get the most WHr's of battery into a low energy configuration. And even there, to some extent the problem is also not where you'd think - you can take a modern i5 down to something like 1.5W idle consumption. Most of the losses are switching circuits or the screen.
      • pjmlp 12y ago
        The issue, as you correctly state, is power consumption and there we still have quite some room for improvement. Other than that, we also have same hybrid multi-core devices on our pockets that we have on our desks. Coupled with all the hardware sensors one can imagine. So besides the power consumption point you rise, there is hardly anything else to improve at hardware level. Except maybe, for things like better voice recognition experience or holographic displays a la Star Wars.
    • TeMPOraL 12y ago
      > but to the dismay of OEMs the cycle is gone Don't worry, they won't give up without a fight. I bet they'll try to push some artificial reasons for people to keep throwing away perfectly good machines every two years.
      • jarek 12y ago
        Maybe they can put some really fragile components in a computer people carry around? Have them be really shiny and look great to help marketing too.
        • TeMPOraL 12y ago
          And then maybe they could make it impossible to repair the broken part for less than a third of a new device. "Tight integration streamlines the production, makes everything cheaper", they could say.
      • jodrellblank 12y ago
        "Artificial" reasons instead of ... what? "Natural" reasons?
        • TeMPOraL 12y ago
          Yes, more-less. Things people invent to extract more money out of their customers, or keep afloat a business model that is visibly incompatible with reality - like planned obsolescence on lightbulbs and fridges, or DRMs.
      • ANTSANTS 12y ago
        Like rewriting everything as a web app?
  • darkmighty 12y ago
    I think we're at a bridging moment. Most computing tasks we came up on the last decades which were very hard to get done are now trivial with some optimization. Yet the general purpose ("universal") algorithms we dreamed of are still not in reach -- it's easy to think of an evolutionary algo huge neural net to do AI, but in practice universality implies (still) inaccessible search spaces. So hrdware looks as if standing still.
• userbinator 12y ago
  As someone who has watched the "RISC revolution" and the claims its proponents have been making since the 80s, I'm not so optimistic on what will happen. Initially it was all about increasing clock frequency to make up for increased instruction counts and decreased code density, but Intel's Netburst showed that this strategy was a dead end. Then the focus was on power efficiency, which is still a close battle today. I don't think it's a matter of budget; AMD has much less to spend than Intel, yet it makes x86 CPUs that are still quite competitive even if they're not as fast - the gap between them is nowhere near their differences in budget. It seems that things are more like "fast, cheap, power-efficient: pick two". This related paper is an interesting read: http://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/isa-power-struggles-tr.pdf http://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/isa-power-s... I think x86 still has plenty of room for optimisation, and Intel are just doing it slowly according to market conditions. An open-source x86 core would be great - in fact, pre-MMX-level x86 is fully open, as all the patents on that have expired now.
  • pjmlp 12y ago
    I also lived through it, but I would say that RISC won in the end, just not exactly as its proponents thought. x86 are no longer real CISC, as they moved the internal architecture to RISC, starting with the Pentium 4. And all the other processors that matter are also RISC. The real loosers were the VLIW proponents.
    • taeric 12y ago
      Sounds suspicious to claim victory while redefining terms. :) I'm curious which processors that matter are all RISC. I mean, I realize there are a fair bit of chips out there. I wouldn't have thought many of them really fit the original RISC mold. Sure, they have less instructions than some of the old behemoths. But, that is a far cry from the aims of RISC. There is also the rise in specialized processors. Combining that with the increased focus on consolidating everything into one chip, and much of the debate is just weird nowdays.
      • pjmlp 12y ago
• DCKing 12y ago
  Well there's two predictions you can think about that could happen sometime in the future: 1. Nobody can put more than XXX transistors on a square millimeter (where XXX is some physical limit to chip material) 2. "Everybody" can put YYY transistors on a square millimeter (where YYY is a number sufficiently close to XXX so that the difference does not matter much) The first means some stagnation in the chip market: not only does Moore's Law not apply anymore, but not even does a weak version of Moore's Law ("chips tend to get faster/cheaper over time") apply. But if that scenario becomes true, it doesn't necessarily mean that the democratization of the second scenario becomes true. The ability to put YYY transistors on a square millimeter could still be limited to a select few companies investing billions in the production of these chips. After all, how many fabs worldwide are currently capable of producing 45nm chips, which could be considered "commodity" [1]? Is it really true that it becomes much cheaper to produce chips on smaller process nodes over time? Sure it becomes cheaper since less original R&D is necessary, but is it reasonable to think that producing 20nm chips ever becomes a question of investing anything less than, say, 100s of millions? Does the second scenario ever become true, at least in the forseeable future? I don't know much about chip fabs so I wonder if someone more knowledgeable could share some insight on this. [1]: I genuinely don't know the answer to this, but I don't suppose it's very widespread?
  • mechagodzilla 12y ago
    These days, Intel is an unusual model in that they own the whole 'stack', from processor design to fabrication, packaging, etc. To replicate that costs 10s of billions of dollars. To get your own chip produced using a 'pure-play' fab (which, these days, basically means TSMC, and to a lesser extent Samsung and GloFo), however, is much cheaper. If you want a 20nm chip, you design your chip (basically the cost is just engineering effort + CAD tools..a few million $$), send it to TSMC (getting masks made is another few million $$), and they send you back chips. Reality is slightly more complicated, in that you're using using an integrator to manage the relationship with TSMC, the packaging company, the testing company, etc., but a startup with $10-20 million could probably scrape together a decent 20nm chip. Once TSMC has built a new fab though, the longer it is 'relevant' the cheaper they can make the wafers, as they have more wafers to amortize the ~$10 billion or whatever it cost to build the fab over.
• stephencanon 12y ago
  > These days, Intel's 32nm, 22nm chips (and 14nm, from what is known about Broadwell) are more or less identical from a consumer's perspective. That’s a little bit of a stretch. 32nm was Westmere -> Sandybridge, which doubled FP throughput and L1 load bandwidth, among other changes. Haswell doubled FP throughput again, doubled integer SIMD throughput, and doubled L1 load and store bandwidth, among several other significant changes, and there’s also been a steady ~10% per generation improvement in generic IPC. Consumers don’t care about those numbers, but they do care about some of the operations they enable getting faster. (In fairness, this often lags the release of the processors by a year or two as SW re-optimization is required to take advantage of new features; the full benefit of the changes isn’t available to consumers until some time after the processors are released, by which time we’ve all forgotten just how slow our old hardware was.) The energy footprint of those processors has shrunken considerably in the same time, which is a huge improvement for portables.
  • valarauca1 12y ago
    >The energy footprint of those processors has shrunken considerably in the same time, which is a huge improvement for portables. Yes and no. The Westermere, Sandybridge, Ivybridge, Haskell, Devil Cannon's line isn't really targeted for the mobile market. The shinking power budget is caused by 2 things. 1) To stay competitive against 64bit ARM processors. Intel processors are barely used in mobile devices. But eventually ARM will attempt to transition into laptop/desktop/server and compete with Intel directly, this is where lower power comes into play. 2) Feature set. New features (functionality) on chip cost not just dye space, but cost power and heat. The heat and power are the far most critical issues. The second issue is commedically addressed in, "The Cold Winter" a satirical document about hardware engineering. "The idea of creating more and more cores ran into an issue. Most people don't use their computer simulating 4 nuclear explosions while rendering Avatar in 1080p. They use their computer for precisely 10 things, of which 6 of things involve pornography. The other issue was the 600 core dub 'Hydra of Destiny' was so smart that its design document was the best chess player in the facility. The issue was it required its own dedicated coal fired plant, and would run so hot that it would melt its way into the earth's core." - The Cold Winter (paraphased)