On 7 January 2011 15:24, Carl Jokl <[email protected]> wrote: > I am not sure the 1000s or cores in a desktop machine principle is > realistic. This seems like just taking the the current core count > increase as being able to keep going up forever. It seems like a > casual assumption was also made about processor clock rate until that > hit its practical limit about 2003. From what I read it is expected to > be unlikely that manufacturing processes can shrink bellow 16 > nanometers. With mainstream processors already being produced at 32 > nanometers it seems like it may only be 2 die shrink generations till > we reach that limit. If a processor can be manufactured today with 8 > cores on a 32 nanometer manufacturing process then at 16 nanometers > the same processor should fit into more or less a quarter of the size. > That would give 32 cores. If a processor today can be manufactured > with more simple cores say 32 of them then at 16 nanometers there > would be 128 cores. If 64 cores today then that becomes 256. This > brings us to between tens of cores to a couple of hundred or so > depending on the complexity of each core. The idea of thousands of > cores for a client machine at least may not be realistic. The trend is > also now to combine CPU and GPU on a single die. The GPU is generally > larger than the CPU so such combined processors would have to > sacrifice processing cores for GPU cores or other items integrated on > the die. In practice 3-4Ghz ended up being a limit. If 16 nanometer > ends up being a practical limit too then there comes a cut of point > after which more cores cannot be added. This too in the foreseeable > future. Perhaps it will be possible to go bellow 16 nanometers but > fundamentally the size of atoms is fixed meaning there is a limit to > how small things can be shrunk. Increasing the size of the die > increases heat, power consumption and potential for timer signal > latency issues so there are limits on expanding that way too. > > Except... 1000 cores has already been done! http://lmgtfy.com/?q=1000+core+processor Of course, there's also a 3rd dimension available, so these things can be stacked in a single package.
There's another issue also at work here, having a greater number of less-powerful cores uses less electricity. So there's less heat to dissipate, fine-grained power management becomes possible by turning off cores one at a time, and carbon footprints go down. I think it's also reasonable to expect that CPUs and GPUs will gradually merge back into a single unit. The industry is absolutely headed in this direction... -- Kevin Wright gtalk / msn : [email protected] <[email protected]>mail: [email protected] vibe / skype: kev.lee.wright twitter: @thecoda -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
