What ever happened to CPU improvements?

I have bought this Pentium 4 2.6ghz more two years ago. Now, the only CPU that is significantly better (by about 15%) is the AMD 64 bit processor, but as i understand it's mostly better for gaming. What happened to the CPU improvements? I know the story about silicon reaching it's limit, and i know the stories about slow development for higher profits (milking), but hey. Pentium (I mean Intel) used to make a new cpu every year and the improvements in performance were about 80%!

Does anyone know any predictions of how soon CPUs will be improving and by how much? I pretty much only see GPUs improving and i'm thinking about replacing my CPU with my GPU soon, if things remain the same. :) I'll write a whole operating system to work on the shader pipeline, I swear.

Where's the nanostuff, the biocrap and the optical circus we hear about?

Yeah, I was wondering if anybody else had noticed this. There is a 'rule of thumb' that states computing power doubles every 18 months - that was the case for a while, but I've had my 3Ghz PC for at least a year, and the current top-end consumer processors only seem to be pushing 3.3Ghz (ish).
My first thought is that 99% of people with PCs could actually get by with a 100Mhz machine - You don't need all this power when all you do is browse the net and write documents in Word. Even games machines aren't processor dependant as its mostly about the GFX card. Perhaps they've realised that they can sell new machines by making the cases look prettier as most people don't have a clue what they're actually buying anyway. :(

As for the 'physical limits' of current technology - I wouldn't put any faith in any of those predictions. I remember reading an article in a techy magazine when the top-end processors were 300Mhz that said any processor over 500Mhz would have to be kept in a refridgerator!

I read about this issue back in 2000 that eventually the processor speed will go into a plateau phase within the next few years which is whats happening now. It has to do with current achitecture that is used to build these processors....it will eventually hit a limit. The only thing they can do now is go into another direction with a different architecture in order to continue the increase in speed. Such as the case with AMD 64 and the upcomming PS3 Cell processor (which has it's own list of pros and cons).

Its also apparent that CPU processor speeds really don't affect regular daily work (most IT companies still have no problem working with old Pentium 3 machines) and it won't significantly improve gamming either, which is why the sudden rise in GPU processing power - because a weaker computer with a highend graphic card can run games better than a higher end computer with a weak graphic card. Of course most it depends on which the game and the computer setup.

I think the new trend now for most computer makers is multi-core or multi-processing systems which is basically a computer with 2 or more processors. While having 2 CPUs is better than one, it doesnt significantly improve anything unless you're planning on multitasking several apps at a time or your software/game makes use of it (similar to the issue with the AMD 64 when it first came out).

But enough of my caffine overdose induced rambling this morning...I better get some "work" done....

Yea i read about the "plateau phase" as well. But are there any reasonably concrete predictions? The "When and by how much" kind of prediction?

Im asking as i have no clue. Is the optical-driven technology the most likely one to be the next improvement? Will it happen by 2010 or 2020? ...if anyone would know...


EDIT: THIS WAS MY 1000th post.

Quantum computers are just around the corner!
...or so we've been told

The A64 has quite a big speed increase in games over P4's. There was a really interesting article about CPU performance with extensive benchmarks.

Instead of just taking the FPS in the game, they calculated the average FPS and found that the P4 would fluctuate wildly and spent a good 40% on average below their self imposed 40FPS threshhold with occasional peaks that could beat the A64. However the A64 was had a more consistent performance and fell below the threshold less than 20% of the time.

It was a great article, if I saved it in I'll post it. As for regular computing. MS office ran better on a P2 400 in XP than it did in win2k or 98 so long as you had more than 256mb of ram. the athlon 1200 that I replaced it with is a lot snappier and the difference in office as far as regular simple tasks really is negligible.

It's only when you use something like 3dsmax that the speed increase is apparent. Jumping from the 1200 to the A64 3200+ I was disappointed when rendering a GI lightmap untill I realised that I had accidentaly reset the number of rays being cast to the default of 250 instead of the 50 I use for quick testsamples. It rendered in about the same time, which was actually awesome :)

Lots of solutions to the silicon problems though.
One of the further along ones is using light, and there are also a few successful concepts involving using teleportation to run a faster computer.

looks like they are just throwing more processors and using threading to get around the problem for now. So for the meantime we have to wait for the software tu catch up and do decent multithreading.

At least with games THe 360 and PS3 will probably help somewhat, but I'm sure we won't get real benefits till after Vista comes out.

While CPU's are continueing to improve, manufacturers are running very close to the physical limits to how far the current technology can be pushed. Things are scaled down so far now, that they already had to come up with all kinds of magic to make sure that the interconnects on the chip itself can reliably transfer the signals. There is now so much that goes on on such a small area that the heat output also gets concentrated in a much smaller area, raising the temperatures considerably making it even more difficult for the chip to operate properly. There is still room for improvement, but the more traditional methods of increasing the clock frequency and miniaturization are close to how far they can be pushed with todays technology. Instead, Intel and AMD realized that there are much more significant speed jumps to be gained by combining CPU's: hence the trend towards dual-core CPU's now.

Both AMD and Intel have worked hard on these. It's not just a matter of slapping two CPU's on a chip, there was a lot of work involved in making the two cores communicate with the system and each other efficiently, and the dual-core race has taken up a lot of time for both companies. Both wanted to be first to market, to have a big edge over the other. Also, keep in mind that the current dual-core chips are just the beginning -- over the years, you can expect 4-core, 8-core, or many more on a single chip, possibly even more for high-end servers. A single-threaded application won't gain much from these multi-core chips, but running multiple applications at the same time, or using multi-threaded programs will continue to see big boost.

It's worth noting that AMD's dual core 64 bit chips beat the pants off of the Intel Pentium D (dual core). Intel was clearly rushing things to market to try to beat AMD... But for their sake they better have something up their sleeves.
Some of intel's past design choices (higher frequency, but longer processing pipelines) are now coming back to haunt it, since the communication between their CPU cores and each other and the rest of the system is significantly less efficient than AMD's. (Hence AMD's ability to give a lot more bang for the same GHz)

Shame that the dual core CPUS won't make any difference to games and our games won't run any faster. You'd need to restructure all your code to split loops into a certain number of smaller loops based on how many CPUs you have, and get each CPU to run a smaller loop in parallel. Of course it would be really nice if the compile did this for you but it would need some naff detection code at the start of every loop which would slow down non multi-CPU systems. Of course lots of operations would still be just as slow such as Disk IO and BUS transfers (e.g. video card). Also could multi-cpus write to RAM at the same time (full speed)or not, I suspect not (please correct me If I'm wrong on this), which would make them a bit rubbish for example copying a GB of RAM from here to there (blitting in RAM) couldn't be speeded up with two CPUs doing it in parallel if there was a limit to the RAM bandwidth and the CPUs were faster than the RAM bandwidth, if you get what I mean.

Well, if I'm not mistaken, I believe that with the old 5xx series from Intel, when HT Technology first came out, it almost reached the 4 GHz level, the highest was about 3.8 GHz, if I'm not mistaken (which would be the 570 model). However, that would cost you almost $1K back in the old days for the processor alone. I'm not too sure if the AMD 3800+ or 4000+ would clock to that speed or not, but it may be quite close. Of course, for the Athlon 64 x2, you can probably go up to 4200+ right now, maybe a 4400+ if you're lucky. I hear the next generation could be as high as 5500+ by this time next year, but we'll soon see.

Excuse me?

Interesting info there guys. Hah, imagine a 64 processor system. There would be no way they could all communicate efficiently and we'd need a completely different way of coding things. Some sort of AI (literally) to distribute the power would be needed, probably coded specifically for each app. lol thats just silly

Maybe we should thank M$ for making Vista with huge requirements, otherwise noone would have incentive to build better CPUs. So inefficiency leads to efficiency(?). Would be best if they made Office in 3D and forced it to do software rendering.

The only technological limit that exists anywhere in any industry is marketiting and sales figures.

There is always a way if the reward is sufficient to justify the investment.

Technology is only bound by the limitations of what we'll buy.

You can buy AMD64's that leave a p4 2.6ghz standing.

> Hah, imagine a 64 processor system.

It should be possible to have 64 of them doing independent collision checks as an example. Not easy, but possible.

Question is, what do you guys do with all this CPU power?

I'm often suprised at how sales people tell parents their little Johnny and Gemima must have a super duper Pentium blah blah cos it makes the internet go faster etc ...

I imagine most of the time is spent surfing, playing the odd game, and email/chat. Nothing which really requires a monster CPU.

When I upgraded from a P4 1.3Ghz to a P4 3.6Ghz I could hardly notice anything difference. However, a simple act such as adding an extra 256MB ram makes a notable difference.

Intel are bandying around figures such as 45 nano-meters. This should enable 4-8 cores per CPU. This will eventually be matched either by us guys really getting multi-threading or by a new programming language that takes the sting out of that kind of thing.

AMD may still have a few more MHz to offer us, but their current fabrication process and pipeline lengths would suggest that they may have reached a peak where MHz are concerned. Intel definately have, they tried for, but failed to produce, a reliable 4GHz CPU.

We seem to be heading (again) down the co-processor route to data processing.

GPU's are now commonplace and PPU's will start to make their appearance next year, once they make their way nice and reliably onto ASICs and off FPGA's (I would hope!).

For general processing, a top-range CPU from Intel or AMD will currently meet 99% of all our requirements. Possibly the most demanding applications us little lot will use will be games. RAR and video compression remain the last bastion of CPU hungry everyday tasks. Of course, ATI have stepped in with a GPU solution for video (re)compression, which is apparently quite awesomely fast.

Niche applications requiring trillions of floating point operations pretty much comprise of ray-tracing and mechanical stress simulation. Not exactly you-and-me kind of tasks :)

Even speech-recognition is handled adriotley by modern consumer CPU's. I think we tend to forget quite how slow CPU's were not 2 or 3 years ago. We all know, by repetative reminder, that the slowest thing in our computer is secondary storage (i.e., your HD).

Show me a 10X faster CPU and I'll smile, show me a 10X faster HD and I'll rip your arm off to buy one :)

Well when you look at it that way we don't really need PCs at all. All we really need is clean water, some wheat, some meat, a fire and and maybe a roof over our heads. Depends on preference of comfort really.

@Becks, I suppose if we all paid massive amounts to buy PCs, the technology would progress quicker but decreasingly so, as it depends on a huge amount of other technologies. There are many concepts that simply need testing and time so extra money would help little I guess. No clear refference, I just remember hearing about this.

Skim Skim Skim... Sorry if I'm repeating everyone else... too much text to read!

Does the CPU need to get any faster for 99.999% of things? That's not where the bottle neck is

Sure, push more ram in the computer, get a better sound card, get a better graphics card...

At some point I'll upgrade my graphics card, my geforce 3 ti200 is getting a bit old now... if anyone's got an old graphics card kicking around in a box that's better than a that and fancies being fesitive then drop me an email :)

I can't believe so many of you think 4Ghz is all we need. I'm always doing things with my PC that want more speed. Some of you have brushed aside "the odd game" as irrelevent to the CPU, it isn't. A faster CPU means more portalisation means bigger and more immersive gameworlds, even if it's the GPU that renders them.

I'm always finding myself waiting on the machine, whether it be because i've added an extra iteration on mesh smooth in max, or because i'm processing an image half a million pixels wide by quarter of a million pixels high as I was this weekend (all weekend more to the point, I spent half my time programming auto-resuming optimisations on the Mac and the PC just churned out the raw processing).

All the time I find myself waiting on the computer, and it's not TCP timeouts that are giving me the busy pointer.

I have a requirement for a faster computer, 4Ghz isn't anywhere close. I admit i'm a power user in terms of what I do with the machine, but so are a lot of other people and then there's all the gamers.

A faster CPU for me not only would mean making games is "less painful" for me, but I could then have more portalisation data to make more immersive worlds.

Computer are nowhere close to creating life-like environments in games, I dont care if the Human body does combust if it travels over 30mph on one of your steam powered metal monsters, the technology will come, and I want it*.

* current financial situation excepted of course.

Hehe making games will always be equally painful, because if CPUs (and stuff) get better that means you have to make them in yet more detail and you're back at square one!

Maybe "older" people think that what we have now is enough, while younger ones seem to always want more, its natural for them to expect things to improve, while its natural for older people to accept reality as something that actually stops improving after a while. Uhhh... right.

I want a two terahertz chip... and I'm not gonna be happy til I get it. Got it? :)

can still take 2 hours to render a decent quality GI lightmap on my A64. there's tons of stuff that could do with extra CPU power really. For Day to day office work you can get by with almost anything thats been out these past 5 years.

What is that reference to? It sounds interesting.

we'll have to wait until Intel/Microsoft manage to make a reliable 64bit CPU/OS. 32bit is dead and has been for some time. But if you want to see more than a marginal power increase in a 64bit system you need to use a real 64bit OS and applications. AMD and Linux seem to be the option nowadays, but that's not for the normal HOME PC.

NOTE. When computers moved from 8bit to 16bit, and from 16bit to 32bit, many leading hardware and software manufacturers dissapeared or went through bad times (some have survived). I wonder if this will be true this time.

Drew. I believe he is referencing the beliefs early in automobile history that the human body couldn't withstand the forces that would be put on it if a car travelled faster than 30 miles per hour. :)

Who woulda thought, i made it to 1000 posts.

MadMax, people learn. If it happens once its less likely to happen again. Besides, the industry is much more structured now with teams carefully watching out for future developments and trends. Back then, i think it was smaller budgets and less serious understanding about such issues.

@Kanati:
Exactly. I want to read a case of someone saying that. Like
the Bill Gates quote "640k is enough for anyone" or like that
scientist who stated back in 1901 that "there is nothing left
to invent".

I love that stuff. It reassures me that there will be interesting times ahead.

Except that in practice, when everyone stops saying such silly things, the great things stop happening.

I'm not sure what you mean. By saying these doubting words, great things are less likely to happen.
Because it implies that "we needn't innovate anymore".

Yeah, I think we need a new hardware architecture.... Something more based around objects and threads and uses something like .net IL as the base assembly. Such an architecture would easily adapt to multiple processors, multiple computers. I'm thinking of an architecture where not crashing is guaranteed in the hardware not just the software.

Not only the architecture of the cpu though, peripherals would all have the same basic plug 'n play protocol that sends info about the device - name, manufacturer, driver downloads for various OSes, website. Perhaps even a system for advanced devices that can serve up their drivers right to you - everything can act like a hard drive if it likes. Graphics cards would work as a hard drive, allowing you to transfer in textures and models and send in matrices for them, much more efficient than sending every vertex every frame as in traditional methods. Same thing with sound cards. they are basically a hard drive that the application sends sounds to, basically preventing any sort of sound glitches from CPU load.

Both of these things would greatly simplify programming the tasks of graphics and audio, speed them up, and make them more reliable.

Maybe someone will create a totally new architechture for modern computers, I think one of the main limits now is architecture. Why we need a 2 ghz dumb processor rather than a 300mhz smart processor for office tasks

It fires up people to prove them wrong. People love doing that :o)

One of the biggest limitations right now is the fact that the processors are leaps and bounds faster than anything that can 'feed' them. Ram is too slow, and with large programs that need fast CPUs (Like Raptor, and other large scale Engeneering packages) the HD and RAM can't feed the CPU as fast as the CPU could process the data... so it ends up waiting for the other aspects of the computer to catch up.... The only good solution is going to be another stage or stages... right now you have HD-ram-CPU (with some other things, but as far as from when you click on that icon to when you see something happen, those are the chokes.) HD is far too slow anymore, and the RAM is far too slow for things that get called A LOT... There needs to be something like another drive thats smaller than a HD and less permanently reliable as a HD that loads programs and other things that are too big for ram or don't get called a lot, like the entire windows OS could be loaded into it on startup and would drasticly increase speeds on a system with less than a gig of RAM... there will also need to either be much FASTER ram even if it is less dense because the speed that it takes to go from RAM to the CPU for processing is so slow now that most high end CPUs just sit and wait for it... Even my own 2.4 ghz PC waits while I do things like render out large files in PS... It will slow down long before the CPU would be in trouble... Due to the fact that the ram is slow, and it will freeze to a standstill when the HD has to be accessed when the ram is all swamped like when I am rendering out giant files.

If I had a super fast secondary drive with as little as 10-20 gigs, I would still be able to use the computer for other things.... And if that secondary drive were used RATHER than the ram, I could render out a 40 megapixel image while using the computer at the same speed as when I just had PS open, since the RAM would still be free enough to do things. And then the CPU would be getting info from 2 sources, and I could use AIM or surf the net while I wait for my my file to render.

Until the other hardware gets to the same level as the CPUs have, then it isn't going to make much difference how fast the CPUs get... this is why the A64s are better for games but show little difference anywhere else.

Or at least that is my understanding... From what the electrical engeneers in my family tell me... I'm no expert in this...

All might be skewed and false.... but the one thing that is true, is that it isn't the CPU's fault that you don't see a change from a 1.2 ghz to anything better when processing large files or large amounts of data. It is the fault of all the other hardware that can't keep up.

Or so they tell me.

Storage and Video pipeline... they have to catch up... too slow...

And then there was asynchronus computing... (skeptical but see where it might work...)

>If I had a super fast secondary drive with as little as 10-
>20 gigs, I would still be able to use the computer for
>other things....

It just a matter of buying it then...

http://firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=8131&filterLevel=1&up=&pnum=9

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/products.htm#hyperosHDIIproduct


Andy

well, actually andy, it is a matter of getting the computer to treat a super fast HD as a swap drive... And then getting the computer to not try to fill the ram up first, but to take large files and use the swap drive as RAM... not as easy as you might think... infact... not possible without drastic changes to the OS I would think.... agian.. not my area.

I'm pretty certain hardware exists to use *DDR RAM* as a page file hard drive. No time to find a link, but someone posted it here recently.

Heheh, I can already imagine "CPU rent" stores cropping up everywhere.

"Need more CPU power? We'll let you use 32 of our Modulum 4000 processors for only $19.99 a day!!"

Hopefully the whatever new technology comes out will completely change the architecture as well. I mean if we (the unexpert smartar$e people) talk about it, the companies must know a hint. Right? :(

> Maybe "older" people think that what we have now is enough,

This old fart certainly doesn't think so! Not till we have Star Trek's Holodeck. (and maybe not even then)

I always need more CPU power and Hard Disk power and graphic card power. Until my computer boots in 0.5 seconds and I never have to wait for anything to load/save/process I won't be 100% happy.

I cant imagine anything that requires an image to be 500k pixels wide, even a cinema poster only needs about 4k.

You're referring to a render farm :)

One area nobody has touched on is music - virtual instruments and FX are VERY power hungry beasts, and have been the cause of my upgrades for years. I still run out of power and I've got a pretty much top-end system.

Unlikely to happen anytime soon: the major stumbling block is backwards compatibility. Intel's 64bit Itanium chips were a pretty big failure, since they weren't backwards compatible with the existing 32-bit chips like AMD's offerings were. The end result is Intel dropping the Itanium other than for some niche server applications, and being over a billion dollars of research money in the hole over that deal while quietly adopting AMD's 64-bit extensions in the current intel 64-bit CPU's.
Unless the benefit of the new architecture is mindblowingly amazing (unlikely, since pretty much all performance increases are slow & incremental), people simply won't jump ships en-masse.

Hardware is changing slowly though -- PS/2 ports, parallel & even the integrated floppy controllers are all on their way out. But even with todays gigabyte-RAM personal computer systems, internally they still juggle everything around to fit in the 640KB of base memory.

Despite all the complaining about windows, you still don't see very many switching to Mac's or Linux, both of which are arguably better... But backwards compatibility is a *huge* deal. People don't want to give up their familiar software programs, their little tweaks & personalizations, etc.

For all the people trumpeting about 4GHz CPUs or whatever, you do realise that it's just the frequency the processor runs at, right?

Frequency is just one part of the equation, you have loads of other technologies, and architecture issues at play.

I could clock my Athlon 64 down to 33MHz and it'd still beat the pants off a 486 DX2-66. Ask yourself why an Opteron clocked slower than an A64 can still beat the A64?

Frequency might not be increasing, but what a processor can do, and overall complexity certainly is. You've gotta stop thinking like Intel 2002 Marketing suckers. Reality is you'll probably see a lot more sub 3GHz CPUs from both Intel and AMD but they'll be doing much more per-cycle than their older brethren.

So to sum it up, the gap between current and possible architecture performance will keep widening, and once the benefits of switching to new architecture outweigh the costs of backward compability, there will be a switch. Which isn't so great because it will probably take a lot of years.

Clock Frequency was once a reasonable guide (kinda like engine size) but is much less so now. It comes back down to MIPS again, the ole dhrystone and whetstone benchmarks. Of course there's also all the fancy multi-media extensions for encoding video etc to, but how often do most people do that?

gah! my christmas license agreement got deleted, I thought it was vaguely IT related as it was a mutated software licence agreement, anyway look here:
http://www.codecomments.com/archive207-2004-12-350596.html

It was the reaction much of the general public had to the first locomotives. 30mph was considered an improbable and impossible speed barrier, many believed that the Human body simply would not be able to take the extreme forces placed on the body.

In context, I was saying that the technical details being discussed here are all moot. There's always a solution if there is money to be found on the other side of finding it.


I'm a middle age fogie, just young enough to fall into the disposable income target market but too old to know the difference between hip hop and rap or whatever it is todays violently inclined 20 year olds are up too...


A half a second boot time is a half a second wait. I want it to have loaded and cached all my programs by the time my hand has reached the keyboard & mouse from the on button.


The project in question was raw map data being compiled into tiles.


And half of us left with a Betamax.


This is very true, as I mentioned earlier bus speed has far more impact for games. However frequency has a direct tangeable value to marketteers, and Western technology is sales driven, therefore I think faster CPU's are more likely than a revised architecture.

my 0.5 boot time is bearable I was just giving it some leniency in case we still us M$ OS.

> However frequency has a direct tangeable value to marketteers, and Western technology is sales driven

Didn't AMD switch around to marketing chips with a number that was not directly tied to frequency a couple years back? As long as the number keeps going up (whatever it is actually based on) the marketers are happy.

They did, and I think it was the best thing they ever did. Their 'performance code' is probably the best and most relevant performance indicator you can get.

Not everyone will agree, but then the world will be a better place when everyone just admits that I'm always right ;)

Oh, since you're wondering, "Hip Hop" is a cultural movement that began in the 70's by mainly African Americans, Jamaicans, and Latinos in New York which evolved into what it is today. It is broken into many branches that can include "DJing", "MCing", "BreakDancing", "Beatboxing" and of course "Rapping". "Rap" is a form of Hip Hop music based on rhythmically rhyming words over a structured beat and music, originally remixed from another records along with sampling. Nowadays most Rap music are often created by using keyboard, drum machines and other electronic instruments. Hip Hop music can also include certain R&B where Rap lyrics are performed but those type of music are not considered Rap. It was once considered to be a fad during the early 80s (just as Rock was in the 50's) in which many ethnic music performers would make use of (such as Blondie and Falco) but has evidently continued to prosper. Rap music are often noted for enjambement and hyperbole to enhance the flow of complicated rhyming, intense aggressiveness, as well as profantiy and references to sex (bitches and ho's). Although the hip hop community does not condone such profanity and references, it is nonetheless part of the hip hop culture.

Ok now back to CPU topic.

AMD switched to those performance codes a number of years ago -- IIRC they compare performance with the original 1GHz Thunderbird CPU, meaning that a 2000+ is twice as fast, a 3000+ three times as fast, regardless of the operating frequency. They occasionally have two different CPU models that have the same + rating, but a newer design may operate at hundreds of megahertz less to still give the same output (thereby leaving room for additional speed increases later on, and cutting down on heat generation)

Interestingly, Intell also has been trying to de-emphasize the MHz rating recently. While their MHz ratings were a bit higher than AMD's they used to always tout their MHz speeds under the 'bigger is better' flag, but now they are running into a wall themselves scaling up the frequencies (What 4GHz pentium? Long overdue.) they too are attempting to de-emphasize MHz rating and coming up with code-named for their chip lines. Intel is now trying to take the performance indicator out of the name altogether, but so far the market isn't really letting them. In part because AMD continues to give absolute ratings like the 2800+, 3200+, etc. Intel can't just switch to "it's a Pentium, model 370. Stop asking so many questions", much as they would like.

Which brings us nicely back to the fact that CPU speed these days is rather redundant when taking a complete system into consideration.

Power usage is going to become the key factor (as oil prices climb ever higher ever more quickly over the course of my lifetime (another 30-40 years)). AMD are already selling laptop CPU's based almost solely in terms of Wattage, with performance being less than a secondary consideration.

I agree with such numbers for marketing, next to processor names. I for one dont like digging out tons of info just to see which processor is "sort of" faster than the other one.

@Becky,
whats a Betamax?

@vinyl,
I read some very down to earth stuff about expanding economies and power consumption, and there it says regardless of how much we want to pay for electricity blackouts should start by 2020 if we dont forget about Oil.

Now once again, back to CPU subject. (lol mods, this is an underground in the making, post 1 relevant sentance and then go OffTopic in the other 20, hahaha)

That's sums up the entire point of my reference too it nicely, thank you.


Actually no, I wasn't :). If there's no lead guitar then there's no Becky screaming her head off behind a steering wheel.

>What happened to the CPU improvements? I know the story
>about silicon reaching it's limit, and i know the stories
>about slow development for higher profits (milking), but
>hey. Pentium (I mean Intel) used to make a new cpu every
>year and the improvements in performance were about 80%!

The last big jump in performance was the Pentium. The various versions of the Pentium Pro, Pentium II and Pentium III were simply the same basic CPU with a larger cache bolted on and higher frequency/higher FSB(although produced in an increasingly more efficient process). The PIV was actually slower than the PIII at the same clockspeed.

>well, actually andy, it is a matter of getting the
>computer to treat a super fast HD as a swap drive...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307886&sd=tech

www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/products.htm#hyperosHDIIproduct

>And then getting the computer to not try to fill the ram
>up first, but to take large files and use the swap drive
>as RAM... not as easy as you might think...

No need for that. Simply use a Ram-drive for the page file and you are done.

EDIT: If you want the fastest possible solution, simply install the OS on the Ram-drive and plug the RAM drive into a cheap UPS. Voila - Windows booting in seconds! Then you just add the programs you want to use on the RAM-drive as well and you're done.

>There is a 'rule of thumb' that states computing power
>doubles every 18 months

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law


Andy

Banshee: "If there's no lead guitar then there's no Becky screaming her head off behind a steering wheel. " Surely you should wait UNTIL the solo has finished before screaming your head off or do you sing the solos, kinda wibble, weeeeaaah, twiddle, bing bong bing, weeaaaah.

That is how NCR did it with the Model 7455. It is a POS we service at DSW all over US and Canada... Problem is when the chip is fried your OS is fried.

Yeah rook, agreed. I like backups though..... :)



Thats me. I dont drive though so i'm in the passenger seat.

Are you implying that singing whilst at the wheel is dangerous?

Strangely, Doctors recommend it.

Well, it's not like computer speed hasn't increased a lot lately. It's just that Pentium-a-Like processors aren't the ones making the greatest progress, compared to other types.

So, yes Moore's law still applies, but perhaps not to your computer :)

No, I'm implying that I don't drive.



:P

Heh, I've put together a CD of classic (and cheesy) 80s rock/metal tracks so I can "hit the road" with the right vibe.

Extreme?

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/quantum-computer.htm

Cyg: No, fraid not. kinda Judas Priest, Breakin' the law, Gary Moore etc. good ole stuff.

Then... Bleh. :)

Saxon-Wheels of Steel (not that good but it's funny), RunDMC/Aerosmith - Walk this Way, Purple - Burn, Skid Row -youth gone wild, Scorpions - Rock you like a hurricane (all cheesy but good), Yngwie Malmsteen - Vengeance, plus some UFO, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath. I don't really listen to the heavier stuff (metallica, megadeth, pantera, slayer etc) in the car with the missus and kids :-) just the cheesy big hair stuff.

Oh I missed out these from another drivin' CD (more rock less heavy):

Rainbow: Since you been gone - Good (cheesy, good solo)
Deep Purple: Smoke on the water - Good (classic)
Chuck Berry: Johnny B Good - Good (classic)
Steppenwolf: Born to be wild - Good (classic)
Bachman-Turner Overdrive: You ain't seen nothing yet - Good (cheese)
Lynyrd Skynyrd: Sweet Home Alabama - Good (groovy)
Allman Brothers: Jessica - OK (top gear theme)
Boston: More than a feeling - good (cheesy)
Santana: Black Magic Woman - good
B.B.King: Thrill is Gone - Good
Jeff Beck: I ain't superstitious - Good (funny)
The Shadows: Wonderful land - Good (classic)
Fleetwood Mac: Need your love so bad - Good (very nice blues)
Roy Buchanan: Sweet Dreams - Good (intrumental)

[edit] sorry for the hikack, but I'm pretty sure music is now suffering from inverse moores law in that the newer it is, the more rubbish it is.

hey, thats not half bad! :P

I remember Extreme from when i was a kid, it brings back those memories :)


Ahem ,off topic!! :P


Nice read there Jhocking. Thats a while old now too so its probrably advanced a bit since then.

jhocking, nice article. If theyre cooking something in Los Almos, makes you think its just a decoy and they are only showing us 10 year old technolog ;)

Who knows if they (NSA) really have a quantum computer already. But its doubtfull because the IBM would probably go as far to steal government secrets just to stay ahead of the game, lol. I'd like to stay alive long enough to see this stuff come along.

I'd guess the NSA have some specialised hardware for crunching their numbers. It's all about the cost, not the tech-level.

>That is how NCR did it with the Model 7455. It is a POS we
>service at DSW all over US and Canada... Problem is when
>the chip is fried your OS is fried.

Which chip? Simply backup regularly and you won't have those worries.


Andy

Extreme!! Argh. Reminds me how old I was when Cygnus was a kid lol. My sister had a Crush on Nuno the guitarist so I couldn't stand them. They did good cover versions of Queen though :)

Hahaha. I'm still a kid deep down. 21 Isn't old is it?
awww man!!!!

Just noticed also Grey, No Queen!?

Anyway,
Personally I recon the quantum computer technology has come along farther than we know- I need to find the latest findings :P

Quantum computers are not really *so* far away. Quantum communications are already being used. Supposedly they're 100% safe (not really, as they have to be inited through an 'unsafe' channel, but the encryption is 100% unbreakable if started 'hearing' in the middle of a transmission)

I'm not a huge queen fan actually, don't know why, think it was to flamboyant for me, May is damn good though, made his guitar from an old cupboard you know.

Ferminho, quantum communications isn't being used yet. It's only recently been publicised that some scientists have managed to have success with experiments (at least on EuroNews) about transmitting data accross a small distance. Yea it is pretty cool that it's unbreakable tho, it is an extremely scientific concept. What is most fascinating is that the entangled photons (i beleive photons were the case) react instnantly (faster than speed of light) to one another, so we'll be able to play Unreal Tournament 2022 while on Mars, on an Earth server, with 0 ping. Ok maybe 1 or 2 ping. Not to mention what that means for space exploration...

Len are you sure of that? I do not usually believe anything at first sight but the teacher who told me about it was into that - its the project manager for some big research into this in my university. He said they're already being used for internal use in universities researching about quantum theory and so.
I just studied the basis of quantum computers but I read some things on teleportation and related things, which may come 'soon' (in our life) - but teleporting bits/information is one thing, material is another I guess hehe

Ok, lets cut the philosophy and get to the point -
What is the fastest mix&match of CONSUMER PC components you can currently buy.

We'll have to set a limit here to define 'consumer' and stop people adding "US army classified neural-net processor project #3271", so lets say £2000 (~$3500) for the entire base unit (no monitor, printer, scanner etc included).

To be honest, I doubt the army would have any machines worth mentioning. ;)

As for a fast machine, get something like
-two Geforce 7800 ultras in SLI configuration
-Amd athlon 64 3200+
-Two harddrives in Raid 0 configuration
-2gigs Kingston Ram
-Water cooling, of course
-Any expensive Motherboard
-BIG power supply. 400-500 watts?

That should do it.

You'll be able to play every crappy, graphics-driven game
created in the next 10 years.

Ferminho, maybe they can communicate in experiments yes, but to send email in a LAN made by this technology, no. Theoretically they could but it needs a lot of technical solving as i beleive the principle is so new still. Besides if they had anything useful i'm sure 100s of companies would be offering superluminal connections right now.

Skitchy, that really depends on your needs and specific tasks you're doing (like we discussed in this thread). In some cases a workstation with multiple processors may be better (rendering) in others a huge amount of ram and a huge bandwidth on the FSB such as for music editing, video editing (i assume). No telling really.

Apart from being one of only four customers for the Cray 4 which could probably do a darn fine version of Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix if they had any sense. Who cares about strategic warheads anymore? It's a waste of computing power if you ask me.

I would love to see more speed. When I first started using Lightwave, buying a new processor meant slashing my rendertime. Going from a Cyrix 133 to a PII400 to a PIII700 to a Athlon 1600+ was a huge enabler for me each time. For example, where even a slight motion blur effect multiplied render times by five, it became an occasionally realistic proposition woth faster CPUs. Since the 1600+, I've been to a 2400+ and a 3000+, with memory speeds increasing from 266 to 400, because the speeds began to increase much more slowly, and prices fell more slowly.

So, as soon as I can afford one, I'm going dual-core. It seems the only way to buy a real increase in computing power.

And games will support dual-core CPU's. All the new consoles will/do, which will help drive the technology. For one thing, their PC versions will already have multi-core code in. Of course, it'll be for more cores than the average PC has, but the expertise will be spreading.

I guess multi-core is the only avenue of expansion to increase silicon processing power. Once you've built as high as you can, the only other way is to expand outwards. :)

Do you think we'll start seeing processors with more than 2 cores? It sounds like a bodge way of increasing power, in some ways. I think the silicon chip has almost reached the end of it's lifespan. We'll have to wait and see what the boffins can come up with to replace it, I s'pose. :)

Isn't using more than 2 cores currently inpractical only for one reason: information flow between CPUs?

Or are there other reasons. I'm still unsure :)

I reckon Big10p is right, end of line, otherwise they'd have done something clever with multi-core already.

Okay, from what I understand from alot of you, the processor companies are no longer pushing for CPUs with higher megahertz. Of course this shows in how the Athlon processors are capable of more work on average than higher-speed Pentium processors. But since megahertz is no longer such a big deal, how do we go about measuring a processor's efficiency?

Another thing, since faster processors don't really affect total system performance, what's holding systems back now? I'd have to guess that it's motherboard bandwidth, and I think the average motherboard bandwidth is something alot less than 1 giggahertz. Would all components in a computer require supporting the higher frequency or would it be possible for a motherboard to communicate at different frequencies? Just being curious about this, and all.

The major components holding back performance are RAM and HD. Accessing RAM, even ultra low latency DDR RAM, causes a massive delay for the CPU.

HD speeds haven't improved as much as CPU speed. HD speeds have remained fairly static over the past few years. There have been small inceremental increases in reading and writing speeds, but access latency has not improved at all. The speed (and accuracy) with which the r/w head(s) in the HD can move has reached a peak.

The only way forward is going to be solid-state storage. Think really big flash-RAM cards. Two major problems need to be resolved before that technology is usable:-

1) Speed. FlashRAM cards (in all their guises) are still nowhere near as fast as HD's for streaming data.
2) Durability. FlashRAM cards wear out. Every time you write to them, it causes wear. Very approximately, after 1000 read/write cycles of a particular area of a card will render it unusable.

If you think how far this technology has moved in the past few years, it seems reasonable to assume that further improvements will be made and we will, one day, be able to consign HD's to be used where tape drives are currently.