On 10/28/2011 7:28 AM, K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
On Thursday 27 Oct 2011 11:27:39 PM BGB wrote:
most likely, processing power will stop increasing (WRT density and/or
watts) once the respective physical limits are met (basically, it would
no longer be possible to get more processing power in the same space or
using less power within the confines of the laws of physics).
The adoption of computing machines at large is driven primarily by three needs
- power (portable), space/weight and speed. The last two are now solvable in
the large but the third one is still stuck in the "dark ages". I recollect a
joke by Dr An Wang (founder of Wang Labs) in keynote during the 80s that goes
something like this:
A man struggled to lug two heavy suitcases into a bogie in a train that was
just about to depart. A fellow passenger helped him in and they start a
conversation. The man turns out to be a salesman from a company that made
portable computers. He showed one that fit in a pocket to his fellow passenger.
"It does everything that a mainframe does and more and it costs only $100".
"Amazing!" exclaimed the passenger as he held the marvel in his hands, "Where
can I get one?". "You can have this piece," said the gracious gent, "as thank
you gift for helping me." "Thank you very much." the passenger was thrilled
beyond words as he gingerly explored the new gadget. Soon, the train reached
the next station and the salesman stepped out. As the train departed, the
passenger yelled at him. "Hey! you forgot your suitcases!". "Not really!" the
gent shouted back. "Those are the batteries for your computer".
;-) .. Subbu
yeah...
this is probably a major issue at this point with "hugely multi-core"
processors:
if built, they would likely use lots of power and produce lots of heat.
this is sort of also an issue with video cards, one gets a new/fancy
nVidia card, which is then noted to have a few issues:
it takes up two card slots (much of this apparently its heat-sink);
it is long enough that it partially sticks into the hard-drive bays;
it requires a 500W power supply;
it requires 4 plugs from the power-supply;
...
so, then one can joke that they have essentially installed a brick into
their computer.
nevermind it getting high framerates in games...
however, they would have an advantage as well:
people can still write their software in good old C/C++/Java/...
it is likely that the existence of existing programming languages and
methodologies will continue to be necessary of new computing technologies.
also, likewise people will continue pushing to gradually drive-down the
memory requirements, but for the most part the power use of devices has
been largely dictated by what one can get from plugging a power-cord
into the wall (vs either running off batteries, or OTOH, requiring one
to plug in a 240V dryer/arc-welder/... style power cord).
elsewhere, I designed a hypothetical ISA, partly combining ideas from
ARM and x86-64, with a few "unique" ways of representing instructions
(the idea being that they are aligned values of 1/2/4/8 bytes, rather
than either more free-form byte-patterns or fixed-width instruction-words).
or such...
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