On Sunday 18 March 2007 16:18, Nicolas Boulay wrote: > > > > > 3) wait for AMD to sell a AMD64 30,000+ x16 CPU? > > > > > > > > Impossible, light isnt that fast. > > > > > > IIRC they now have 6000+ x2, so they only have to find a 5x > > > speed improvement. > > > > Yes, but 4GHz is about the limit how fast chips with > > 2x2cm can be clocked. And even that needs very carefull > > design of the clock distribution and signal routing. > > Keep in mind that 2cm is about the distance a signal > > can travel within one clock cycle (depends a lot on > > the actually used wire model). And then you still > > need some safety margin to reliably operate the chip > > under all specified conditions. > > A pentium 4 use double frequency ALU (this permit to simulate 2 ALU). > Pentium 4 at 3 Ghz exist sine more than 4 years. 3 Ghz cpu imply 6 > Ghz ALU in the pentium 4.
I doubt that that ALU is 2x2cm though, it's probably very small with a localised clock. The Cell chip would perhaps be a better example; it's supposed to go up to 5 GHz I think. But then, that's basically a bunch of loosely coupled DSPs together with a simple PPC core (which I don't think runs at full speed actually, but I'm not sure), so that's another kettle of fish. I do think there's work going on about multiple clock domains and clockless computing, but I don't know whether they are anywhere near production on that. Lourens
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