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A really important article on the future of computing.

 
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Wang Chung
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 12:30 am 
Post subject: A really important article on the future of computing.
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No, no fancy gadgetry or anything, but here is an article by one of my favorite tech columnists, George Ou, about how single threaded development is coming to an end. Notice how over the past decade or so, processors have gone up in clock speed almost exponentially? Eventually a barrier was reached at between 3-4 GhZ, and it is impractical to make a faster chip because it will require so much power and be so hot that it is ridiculously expensive even after the manufacturing.

The solution in the past two years has been to add cores to the processor. Hence Core 2 Duo. Quad Core is coming soon. Intel and AMD R&D are already having battles with 8 cores. Basically the idea is to add another processing unit. The problem is, while these are indeed faster, in order to take advantage of these (and truly get 2x the power, or 4x etc) is to have an application that is coded to work with this dual core processing.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=519

It might be way over your head, but it's really important to read!
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Messy Recipe
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Joined: 13 Mar 2005
Location: Inter Veritates
PostPosted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 2:29 am 
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What about trinary?
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SupaFly
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Joined: 13 Mar 2005
Location: sunnydale mental institution (for the mentally unstable) ((like me)) (((supa)))
PostPosted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 3:13 am 
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USAF 777 wrote:
What about trinary?


computers have problems dealing with prime numbers Razz

(or anything that isnt a power of 2 for that matter Smile)
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theboomboom
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Joined: 13 Mar 2005
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 11:17 am 
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The dude's got a point in saying that multi-threaded applications are the way of the future, but I wouldn't necessarily cap processor speed at 4ghz. This article for instance-
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/32323/113/

Something like this could open the door to an unlimited clock speed if made more efficient. When compared to earlier electricity delivery methods, 20% efficiency is actually pretty good when considering how innovation over time could get those numbers a lot higher.

We also can't change programming every one or two years to keep up with hardware. I think it's going to take some sort of emulation where you could essentially code for a single core cpu, but have it distribute and get the data crunched over all the cores in order for us to keep up with Moore's law.
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Wang Chung
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Location: Virginia Tech
PostPosted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 12:11 pm 
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You might be able to convert a good deal of heat to electricity with that, but it will still be very hot within the processor and in it's immediate vicinity. Of course the heat transfers, but when you have that much power being used, you're going to have an assload of heat.

Of course we should keep extending things in both directions, but for now, multi-core technology with the right programming is much more feasible than boosted clock speeds with advanced and expensive cooling.

The whole point of this article, I believe, is to discuss systems where we can add cores without having to change coding every time. The idea is to, yes, have a platform that can do that for us.

They make good points in the article and comments that software lately has gotten very, very sloppy and bloated. Back in the day, memory, HD space, and CPU cycles were NOT in abundance. Now we all have gigs and gigs of space, two gigs of ram, and an effective 3GhZ of computing power. Simple programs can be bloated.
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Raed
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Joined: 29 Mar 2005
PostPosted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 2:20 pm 
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If coders are even to have a chance to catch up with current technology, then there should be a standard number of cores that they can be threaded to.

The PS3 is being eaten by its competitors. Doesn't it have 7 cores or so? Developers no longer can easily port games over without doing a TON of work.

In the end, if there is some application that scales all the work to different cores for every program, that would be ideal.
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