[Gllug] Duo Core processor 4Gb Ram laptop

[Richard Jones]

On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 11:20:00PM +0000, Anthony Newman wrote:
> I'm hoping I'm not the only one failing to be surprised at that 
> "revelation". We've been temporarily diverted from the business of 
> pursuing increasing clock speeds by using multiple cores, because of the 
> phenomenal financial investment the clock speed war would be likely to 
> require; let's hope that it gets back on track soon. Bring on 22nm :P

Ain't gonna happen ...

Increasing clock speeds were made possible by shortening the cycle
times using lots of "innovations" in processor design stolen from
Crays in the 1960s/1970s (eg. very deep pipelines, Tomasulo's
algorithm, speculative execution and instruction set translation).
Not by process improvement.  All that smaller features sizes will give
you is more gates that we don't know what to do with (except to have
even larger caches with diminishing returns, and to duplicate the same
processor core over and over again).

Look forward to chips with 8, 16, 32, 64 cores, NUMA architectures
with very expensive penalties for hitting non-local memory, and the
realization that our software isn't nearly parallel enough (and
traditional solutions like threads don't scale).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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