Future for CPU's?

[Sunner]

Just curious to see what people In-The-Know think about the future of CPU's, both highend(POWER, SPARC, etc) and consumer grade(P4 and deratives, Athlon, etc).

Seems like more and more companies are beginning to put on-die helper processors, like the SSL engine in Sun's Niagara, and if I'm not mistaken, doesn't the POWER5 have a TCP/IP helper?
IIRC Sun's "Rock" processor will have some of this as well.

Seeing as companies are seemingly changing their strategies from bigger and faster CPU's to thinks like SMT, dual cores, and the above mentioned stuff, what more is coming? Crypto units ala VIA's C3 for the masses? Voice recognition helper units?

Any thoughts?

 

[Wahsapa]

Via's crypto i think is the way things should be going, that and amd's NX. security is quickly becoming the key issue and via's the only one i think that is planning for this with their padlock technology. everybody else is going after massive amounts of processing power when for average users its totally not needed but crypto and security are.

 

[imgod2u]

The future definitely seems to be moving towards what Sun calls "Throughput computing". Multiple threads, high-latency, but high throughput processors and memory subsystems. With dual core and MT on-chip with a lot of cache to supply the bandwidth neccessary to feed the machine. Parallelism will be up to the software writers to create (by creating separate threads) while MPU's will become simpler (multiple simpler, narrow cores in parallel). It's kinda what Intel wanted with VLIW, but more flexible and able to take advantage of today's multithreaded software.

 

[hahher]

Originally posted by: Wahsapa
Via's crypto i think is the way things should be going, that and amd's NX. security is quickly becoming the key issue and via's the only one i think that is planning for this with their padlock technology. everybody else is going after massive amounts of processing power when for average users its totally not needed but crypto and security are.

you would want continued hardware solutions to software problems?

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: hahher

Originally posted by: Wahsapa
Via's crypto i think is the way things should be going, that and amd's NX. security is quickly becoming the key issue and via's the only one i think that is planning for this with their padlock technology. everybody else is going after massive amounts of processing power when for average users its totally not needed but crypto and security are.

you would want continued hardware solutions to software problems?

NX is an excellent thing, one that many other architectures have had for a long time(SPARC, Alpha, etc).

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: hahher

Originally posted by: Wahsapa
Via's crypto i think is the way things should be going, that and amd's NX. security is quickly becoming the key issue and via's the only one i think that is planning for this with their padlock technology. everybody else is going after massive amounts of processing power when for average users its totally not needed but crypto and security are.

you would want continued hardware solutions to software problems?

NX is an excellent thing, one that many other architectures have had for a long time(SPARC, Alpha, etc).

I would think hardware solutions to software problems aren't necessarily bad. Software problems will always exist, so the hardware might as well help. Airbags are a technical solution to a human problem, and I'd say they're a good idea . Of course in the ideal world, we wouldn't need NX, and we wouldn't need airbags.

 

[Wahsapa]

i was more talking about via's crypo. trying to get the same type of preformance out of a cpu doing crypto is a waste of cycles compared to letting via's padlock tech take care of stuff like that, i could care less about NX...

 

[Torched]

The future of CPU's i would say is multicores, larger cache, and higher integration.
Also look for Moore's Law to cease as die process shrinking is inevitable but at a slower pace.
Interconnects will have to improve if the current trend of scaling continues.
Full functionality CPU's will come out with north and southbridge integration.
CPUS might have board level connection et. al. direct connect dies similar to WLCSP used by geil memory

 

[4dm]

I really think in 10 - 15 years that cpu's will become like RAM. Your speed is just limited by your budget and limitations of your chipset. Imagine if you will buying four, 8GHz CPUs, then conneting them together to give yourself a 32GHz, quad processor machine. With Intel's fairly new development in silicon fiberoptics, it may be as simple as hooking up your processors with a small fiberoptic link. Your 200MHz BUS just got 5 times faster. . . thats with present day technology though. They expect to reach speeds of 10GHz.

read more about the technology behind what i am talking about here

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

The true future of computing i believe in the short term are multi-cores, faster buses and all around parallel multi-thread processing, then the quantum computers will begin arriving.

 

[f95toli]

As far as we know quantum computers are only good at a some very specifix tasks, mainly database searches and factorizing numbers. For everyhing else a conventional computer is faster.

The QC is limited by the available algorithms, so far only about ten working algorithms have been found (and peopla have been looking for almost 20 years) and only 2-3 are usefull.

 

[cquark]

Originally posted by: hahher

Originally posted by: Wahsapa
Via's crypto i think is the way things should be going, that and amd's NX. security is quickly becoming the key issue and via's the only one i think that is planning for this with their padlock technology. everybody else is going after massive amounts of processing power when for average users its totally not needed but crypto and security are.

you would want continued hardware solutions to software problems?

Software needs hardware support for security. If the CPU didn't offer the ability to differentiate between monitor and user mode, the OS couldn't control the execution of user programs, which could take the CPU and refuse the OS have access to it. If it didn't provide memory management capabilities, there would be no way to protect their memory from each other that couldn't be worked around.

 

[byosys]

My personal perdiction of future CPU's and computer systems in general is that they will become more intergrated with the software they run. Similar to what IBM, Sun, and, to a lesser extent, Apple have done with there respective products. Take a look at the consuel market. The current gaming systems can run with the latest and greatest computers, but they do it with much less processing power. How can the xBox with a 733 Pentium 3 (I think it is a Pentium 3) and 64MB of RAM even hope to compete with a 3GHz P4, 1GB of RAM, and a 9800 Pro? Simple. The software takes full advantage of all (well...most) the hardware. Programmers code the games to take advatage of specific hardware, and as a result, the games run extreamly well on slow hardware. In contrast, modern programs take advantage of only a small fraction of what the hardware has to offer. This is because the CPU/computer makers are not the ones that make the software. As engineers have more trouble to make processors generally faster, consumers will have to turn to better intergration to make their apps run faster. The best way to do this is to have the people that make the hardware make the software.

My 0.02$ anyway.

 

[GoHAnSoN]

Originally posted by: byosys
..... In contrast, modern programs take advantage of only a small fraction of what the hardware has to offer. This is because the CPU/computer makers are not the ones that make the software. ......

My 0.02$ anyway.

xbox can run games with slower system bcos they are meant to display on TV. that's nocomparison with PC monitor with much better antialiasing and stuff.


"modern programs take advantage of only a small fraction of what the hardware has to offer " ??
have to disagree with you. it got to do with humans, not software. we are the ones who is wasting cpu times, they spendt most of the time waiting for us.
my 3 cents....

 

[byosys]

What I ment by "modern programs take advantage of only a small fraction of what the hardware has to offer" is that very few apps take advantage of most of the extras that are included on modern CPU/GPUs. As we all know, every modern CPU is much more than the basic 4 stages. The include vector units, etc, to make it work faster in some specific cases. The problem that I'm talking about is that as CPU makers keep adding extra processing units, programmers usually do not take advantage of them. Look at hyperthreading. Intel realized that, along with other reasons (cough...clockspeed....cough), that 1 thread couldn't possibly use all of the processors resources at a single time. So they designed a technology that allowed 2 threads to use different parts of the processor at a given time. My personal view of the future is where hardware and software are much more closely related and the software uses a much greater percentage of the processors resources.

Mabey the xBox isn't the greatest example, but the fact remains that xBox games use the resources that are avaiable much better than computer apps do.

 

[imgod2u]

Originally posted by: byosys
What I ment by "modern programs take advantage of only a small fraction of what the hardware has to offer" is that very few apps take advantage of most of the extras that are included on modern CPU/GPUs. As we all know, every modern CPU is much more than the basic 4 stages. The include vector units, etc, to make it work faster in some specific cases. The problem that I'm talking about is that as CPU makers keep adding extra processing units, programmers usually do not take advantage of them. Look at hyperthreading. Intel realized that, along with other reasons (cough...clockspeed....cough), that 1 thread couldn't possibly use all of the processors resources at a single time. So they designed a technology that allowed 2 threads to use different parts of the processor at a given time. My personal view of the future is where hardware and software are much more closely related and the software uses a much greater percentage of the processors resources.

Mabey the xBox isn't the greatest example, but the fact remains that xBox games use the resources that are avaiable much better than computer apps do.

Can you say runtime-optimizations? One of the greatest benefits of having a virtual machine run on top of the native machine is that all applications can be written for the virtual machine, and all machine-specific optimizations can be made from within the virtual machine. Want to take advantage of SSE42 or whatever? Update your VM and you're good to go.

 

[Mday]

some chips are moving towards the system-on-a-chip (SOC) strategy. this can ultimately lead to smaller systems which uses less power. consider the athlon64\opteron one step towards that. certain peripheral controllers are already embedded on smaller scale processors.

the future of chips is up to anyone's guess. but the trend has been to simplify\optimize the general instruction set while adding on task specific instruction sets (SIMD, etc) to speed up things that run slow otherwise. i would not be surprised if in the future, you buy 2 chips for a motherboard. One is a processor with some integrated controller, say memory, and the other a peripheral controller (ie, northbridge, southbridge, etc). and all the motherboard is will be a series of expansion slots, and connectors. i would not even be surprised if manufacturers of video cards actually decide on an upgradable solution where you would just pop a chip on and poof, you upgraded your video card to the next gen. but that's never going to happen =P

quantum computing is not really in the future since they arent stable\consistent\useful\cost effective enough to do anything in the real world.

what i do expect is for the computing power to rise, the clock rate to no longer matter, and power usage to go down for CPUs. i wouldnt mind buying a small PC for general purpose web surfing to accompany my huge computer right now. and by small, i dont mean SFF, cuz those are rather large since they use standard desktop devices.

 

[byosys]

Originally posted by: Mday
quantum computing is not really in the future since they arent stable\consistent\useful\cost effective enough to do anything in the real world.

Not yet anyway.

 

[everman]

Quantum computers is the future, albiet no time very soon. But they can be massively parallel. One great thing for gamers I suppose

 

[lexxmac]

Having one company make hardware and software for the best solution possible? Sounds like Apple fills that role. I love my macs.

 

[pX]

I personally believe in the theory that most users (probably not us, we are not *most*) will rely on server side applications for everything in the future. Personal computer will need only access to the web, all your apps will run there (by subscription). More complex stuff; high end games, photoshop, etc will require you to have a ~real computer. I first read about it thru Paul Graham

 

[Runamile]

agreed. I can easily see us pull a 180 and go back to using dumb terminals. Well, in a sence. The infastructure is rapidly being put into place to deliver entire apps on demand via internet.

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Hal ... What are you doing Hal? What are you doing?

 

[Sunner]

I must say I'm scpetical regarding the server side application concept.
For an office, running 50 terminal with Citrix clients can be a Good Thing.

For my parrents to become unable to get any work done due to <ISP outage/a bad cable/a bad NIC/lots of other potential problem> sounds like a Bad Thing.

 

[f95toli]

I think there is a huge misconception about what a quantum computer really is. It is NOT simply a "parallel computer", it is much more complex. As I stated above quantum computers are only good at some very specific problems, for most tasks it would be much slower than a conventional computer.