On 10-aug-08, at 17:24, Don Dailey wrote:
Of course there is also the possibility of some exciting new hardware
breakthrough around the corner that doesn't just extend Moore's law, but
blows it out of the water. From: Mark Boon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Of course there's that possibility. But I'm actually wondering if we wouldn't
>rather be seeing the opposite. Moore's law seems to have stalled for a few
>years, only to gain traction again with multiple core designs. But unlike
>previous advances in computing power, multiple processing is not as easily
>available to all software alike.
True, not all software can utilize 100s or 1000s of processors effectively --
but there is at least one Go program which happily scales to hundreds of
processors. The folks who do HPC will eat up manycore chips by the bushel.
It is reasonable to ask "If the average consumer sees no benefit, will manycore
chips be produced?" One can argue that millions of chips must be sold to
recover the costs of developing higher-resolution processes, new architectures,
and so forth.
I suspect that applications will be developed which harness those chips. We
can't say exactly what they'll be. Games, no doubt, will soak up lots of CPU
cycles. Business desktops will be asked to do far more complex data mining. Web
services will demand lots of CPU cycles. HPC isn't just for universities, oil,
and financial firms; Google and Amazon and other search firms will be asking
for more computer power in more compact spaces using less energy.
Will my Great Aunt Tilda have 256 or 1024 cores on her desktop in ten years?
Probably not; but enthusiasts like those on this list will. Small research
departments will have even bigger clusters; they'll consider an equivalent to
the 800 Power6 cores used last week to be a rather modest investment. This does
not require much extrapolation; several quad chips are widely available; GPUs
use hundreds of processor cores; Sun's Niagara chip has 8 cores which do 8
threads apiece, and claims that a 16 core times 16 thread version (Rock) will
be available in late 2009. Cavium already ships 16-core MIPS-based processors.
Cisco has a 188-core Metro network processor, and Tilera produces a 64-core
chip, the Tile64. Sicortex ships a 6-core MIPS-based chip -- in tightly-coupled
clusters with up to 5832 cores in a single box.
There was a time when million-dollar supercomputers were used for research in
Chess programming. Here's hope that the same will happen for Go programming.
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