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Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002)
- mikektung 13y agoLow power and multicore are cute and all, but imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384GHz cores.
- morkfromork 13y agoImagine the type of machine learning we could do on low power 384GHz multi-cores
- ioquatix 13y agoImagine the type of machine learning we could do on low power 384GHz quantum multi-cores with plasma exhaust relays and phase lock inverters.
- djillionsmix 13y agoInvert the polarity
- aheilbut 13y agoImagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384 low power 1GHz cores.
- smsm42 13y agoI'm afraid the machine you'd get would be a furnace or a torch... AFAIK power that you'd need to dissipate is linear on frequency, so unless we will discover technology to radically lower the voltage used in CPUs or some other parameter, dissipating 100x heat would be kind of a big problem for such CPU.
- sliverstorm 13y agoOk, now imagine what a 384GHz core would cost. (hint: probably more than the world GDP. Each) Ok, NOW imagine what 10,000 3.84GHz cores would cost (100 times more aggregate cycles per second than 1x 384GHz core). What's that, you figure a measly $10-30M instead of more money than exists on earth? Any research simulation is going to want to be parallelized anyway. You'll bump into the limits of the 384GHz core, no doubt about that, at which point you are back to distributed computing. For limitless complexity and limitless appetite for computing power, distributed computing will always be the answer.
- zimbu668 13y agoImagine a Beowulf cluster of these!!!
- pjscott 13y agoIn one clock cycle, light would be able to travel about 780 micrometers. The real propagation speed of signals on a chip will be substantially less than the speed of light, and it gets slower at smaller feature sizes. This could be tricky. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interconnect_bottleneck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interconnect_bottleneck
- hyperbovine 13y agoYou could invent 1000 new ML algorithms in the time it would take you to engineer that.
- frozenport 13y agoThe machine learning I did was never limited by CPU power, but rather my algorithm and especially the states. Asking for better performance without better states is garbage-in-glory-out.
- mikektung 13y agoUnfortunately, many machine learning algorithms aren't easily parallelizable. Consider any boosting ensemble learner, such as the popular random forest, which optimizes the result from the previous iteration. (I run the machine learning startup diffbot.com and we could really use faster cycles.)
- carterschonwald 13y agowhat sort of algorithms would you like to have faster variants/implementations of?
- Impossible 13y agoWe've made some progress with GHz :). http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239098/Desktop_chips_zip_past_4GHz_next_stop_5GHz_ http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239098/Desktop_chips...
- NoPiece 13y agoIndeed, AMD announced their first 5ghz CPU in June at E3. http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-unleashes-2013jun11.aspx http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-unleashes-201... It is for sale now at Newegg for $699. 4.7ghz with 5ghz turbo. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113347 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113...
- veemjeem 13y agoThough speed bumps aren't exactly as crazy as the old days. I remember my next upgrade from a 50Mhz 486 ended up being a 266Mhz Pentium 2. This was over a span of about 3 years.
- Mikeb85 13y agoThe problem is physics. We can't get to higher clock speeds with current materials, due to heat. It's kind of like how fighter jets haven't got any faster (top speed anyway) since the 60's...
- akira2501 13y agoWith current materials in the CMOS manufacturing process; to be a little nitpicky.
- stephengillie 13y agoWell...it's more complex... With die sizes as small as they are, we have a problem where electrons...jump...through basically solid walls from an electrified wire to an unpowered wire. Now, turning on one circuit means the circuit browns-out and a neighboring circuit gets half-powered.
- marshray 13y agoThe MIG-25 is rated at Mach 2.8 GHz, but can be overclocked to 3.2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-25
- dingaling 13y agoIndeed, and first flew in 1964. Note that the follow-on MiG-31 was considerably slower despite sharing the general aerodynamic platform. Since then Vmax has been declining, as the aerodynamics and mechanical complications ( e.g variable intake ramps ) of higher-Mach flight were determined to be less useful than transonic manouevrability and sustained supercruising. The exception to this trend has been the superfighter category ( F-111, F-14, F-15, F-22, Su-27 ) which have maintained the same ~ M2.5 Vmax due to their specific role. Yes, even the F-111 was meant to be a fleet fighter. But none have pushed up past the heady M3.0 level that was routinely broken by a series of prototypes in the 1960s.
- yxhuvud 13y agoFighter jets havn't got any faster because more speed is worthless compared to better avionics. That is also what is happening with computers - it is simply more efficient to cram out more instructions per clock cycle than it is to cram out more clock cycles.
- victorf 13y agoLight has been stuck at c for the last decade, too. When will it break this barrier?
- ioquatix 13y agoThis is the most awesome comment in this post.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- axaxs 13y agoClock speed is an unfortunate marketing gimmick anymore. I dare compare it to peak horsepower. A 3ghz chip from today will run circles around a chip from 2002, and with less power to boot. AMD is ahead in the clock speed race, but gets beat handily by "slower" Intel processors, while using twice the power. The focus going forward is going to be on power efficiency and using more cores, not clock speed.
- stephengillie 13y agoActually, the performance difference is small. The biggest gain we have today is multi-cores, so no one thread can hog all processing pipelines. If you're pushing through 1 billion instructions, it will still take 1/3 of a second for your CPU to chunk through all of it, but other code can be processed simultaneously on another core. I know, I know. My laptop (Lenovo T400) has almost the exact same specs as the old Sunfire V20 rackmounts I have (2x2.4ghz cores, 4gb ram, passable video), but the laptop can run on batteries for 5 hours. But clockspeed is still king -- this T400 run circles around a Lenovo W520 with a 1.6ghz Core i7 and 3x the ram. I know because I had a W520 for work, and I could see the difference.
- ajross 13y agoThis is true, but it's missing the point. A modern CPU gets probably 50% more work out of a median clock cycle and runs 33% faster for single threaded (turbo) workloads. So it's twice as fast. And sure, there are four of them on the die. But back up another decade to 1992, where a top of the line PC was a 50MHz 486 with well under half the IPC of the linked Northwood running 60x slower. For those of us who remember the 80's and 90's, it's a very different world we live in.
- zokier 13y agoThe (single threaded) performance improvement is significantly larger. Anandtech has 2005 vintage Pentium in their benchmarks: http://anandtech.com/bench/product/92?vs=836 http://anandtech.com/bench/product/92?vs=836 and there is probably a significant perf difference between 2002 and 2005. And you can't really ignore the massive improvements gained via GPUs. There are your 100x differences
- rogerbinns 13y agoInstructions per cycle has been getting somewhat better, and it is that number multiplied by the clock speed that is a better indicator of actual performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle Everything else needs to keep up to - it is pointless having a fast processor if it has to keep waiting on memory, storage and the network. Those are very slowly catching up and also lead to overall improved performance. I've been hoping that asynchronous implementations would take over. In theory parts of the chip can run at whatever speeds are best for them at that time, and not have to be synchronised with other parts. And when not in use they easily power down. There were some async ARM chips made, but no progress since 2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor
- nilsbunger 13y agoThis was in Intel's dark days of P4 / "Netburst" microarchitecture. They goosed lots of GHz out of the chip by going with a very deep pipeline, but performance in real-world applications was terrible. (deep processor pipelines kill you when you mispredict a branch). I sat in on a few sales calls from Intel about their new Pentium M / "Centrino" mobile architecture in 2003. What was amazing was that their performance graphs showed that Centrino had all the performance of P4, but with much lower power. Basically, the terrible P4 microarchitecture, plus Intel's incompatible 64-bit approach (Itanium, aka "the Itanic"), left a big hole in the market where AMD stepped in and mopped up for 3-4 years with Opterons, the first 64-bit x86 processors. Even today, x64 architecture is called "AMD64" for this reason -- AMD defined the instruction set, and Intel had to follow (for once). IPC is undoubtedly much higher today, plus now similar machines would have 4 cores or more.
- yuhong 13y agoI wonder why it took until later in 2006 before a version of Pentium M showed up with 64-bit support.
- nilsbunger 13y ago
- auctiontheory 13y agoPower consumption is much better.
- stephengillie 13y agox86 & x86-64 cores still create heat like incandescent lightbulbs.
- ilaksh 13y agoIf we can't make the clock speed faster what about massively increasing the size of the on chip cache? I think they call them like l2 and l3 or something. If I had 1gb of cache then maybe my whole program could run without doing much main memory access. That would be fast right?
- wmf 13y agoCheck out Haswell GT3e with 128 MB of L4 cache. It helps, but probably not enough to justify what they're charging for it.
- m_mueller 13y agoAs long as all users of your program also have that $5000 CPU (if it would exist), this might be a good idea. Cost-wise, with more than 5 users, it probably starts becoming viable to port that application to something more sane, for example $1000 GPUs like NVIDIA's Titan.
- Aardwolf 13y agoCool. Back then there still were articles about a new faster desktop CPU! Today, whenever there's news about a CPU, it's about some other low power mobile whatever thing that is not faster. Yawn.