Where are personal computer CPUs headed?

[Rick Law]

Everything else is just a realization of "faster".

...A Pilot was an executive toy, used by a few. Today's iPhones and Androids are used by every teenager everywhere. The difference is the convenience of small size, long battery life, and broad appeal...

I read in an article that the biggest iPhone/iPad/iSomething market is the 6-11 years old.  I was somewhat surprised when I read that.  Then I thought about events at my daughter's school that I've attended.  The iSomething as baby sitter was omnipresent.  Moms and Dads were there watching their kid play in the band.   Some brought along the younger kids.  Of those, at least one out of 5 were poking away on their iSomething playing some games.  That works, they were not making any noise disrupting the musical performance.

I do wonder when these kids grow up, will they learn much?  They were so glued to their games.  I hope this only happens on special occasions and they would be as glued to their work on normal days.  But, I think that is unlikely.

[Rick Law]

Back in the day it was all about the clock speed, and overclocking. I went through all that.

Then it turned to multi-core CPUs. I currently have a 6-core Athlon, and haven't upgraded in about 3-4 years.

I used to keep up with the technology, but since it got so damn capable I just lost interest. So from you guys (and gals) in the know, where is the technology headed?

More and more cores - or where? 

Early on, it was about power supplies.  You needed a giant.  How many 1K ram boards can you plug in (and they were full size S100 boards).

A colleague of my had a rack (before today's standard rack mount size), it was about 2 feet by 1 feed deep.  The lower 3 feet was devoted to power supply.  He had an 8080 with almost 48K of ram.

I had a 4K board and an 8K board and that was all my psu can take.  I think the 4K board was just under $500, and by the time they introduced 8K, it was merely $600 and change.

[Psi]

Eventually your smartphone will be able to easily stream HD video to a nearby TV/Monitor over some form of gigabit wireless.
(Some phones can kinda do it already using upnp servers but full HD quality is a bit much at the moment)

ie, You could check your email on the phone itself, Or you could sit down next to a bluetooth kbd/mouse and wifi monitor, swipe your phone over some RFID tag (to trigger autoconnect) and then work on more involved things like reading datasheets, routing circuit boards etc.. in a desktop style environment.

For general desktop email/web/document tasks phones have plenty of cpu power (or they will very soon)
However it will take quite a while before the latest computer games drop PC support for phones/pda.
It will probably happen though. For gaming you will pair your Oculus rift version 6 to your phone

Makes me wonder if people might end up walking around wearing some for of VR googles most of the time.
A high megapixel mounted camera would allow them to see with better than normal vision and would allow for google glass style OSD info, image zoom and all sorts of cool features.
It would have to be looked-on as "cool" to wear one though, before it would become popular, and that maybe a bit unrealistic.

[NiHaoMike]

Modern phones have more than enough power to run Descent 2, yet I still play Descent 2 (more accurately, the modern version D2X-XL) on a high end PC. The game physics haven't changed much since the original, but the graphics effects have evolved to the point where even modern hardware can be pushed to the limits. (Not bad for a game that originally came out 17 years ago!)

So while very interesting games can definitely run on a phone, there's always the desire for more. Pretty soon, they'll be asking for 3D games on a 4k (or 8k!) screen (or several!) at 240 FPS, with a set of high speed, high resolution IR cameras as the controller.

[Psi]

CPU cores have been bogged down between 3-4Ghz for a while now and integrating multiple cores has been the pathway to increased performance. There are physical limits to overcome in reducing transistor size which are proving difficult. Power consumption has and will continue to become a major focus.

We will likely see a large increase in core speed when the switch is made to graphene transistors instead of silicon.

[Joules]

Going way out on a limb, I think we are going to see a shift from silicon and current architecture.  Quantum computing (something I don't understand) seems to be well in development.  A move to crystalin optical CPU's driven by a wide spectrum of light, the light operating within the crystal can be routed in 3 axis.  Very low power and very low energy absorbtion.  Current setups are the size of a lab, but so were the early computers.

[G7PSK]

Its not faster or smarter computers or phones that are needed right now its faster links, internet or whatever that are needed.
Computers and phones need to talk to each other directly without having to go through big central hubs all the time every device needs to be a hub on a world wide network. And all this needs to be on an instantaneous basis so that devices can borrow each others computing power for vast parallel processing when required a sort of neural network.   

[Fsck]

Its not faster or smarter computers or phones that are needed right now its faster links, internet or whatever that are needed.
Computers and phones need to talk to each other directly without having to go through big central hubs all the time every device needs to be a hub on a world wide network. And all this needs to be on an instantaneous basis so that devices can borrow each others computing power for vast parallel processing when required a sort of neural network.

we'll all be long dead before we have instantaneous coms

[amyk]

As for demand for computing power, we'll never meet it. Every time someone comes out with a faster computer, many find a use for it. Many things once considered impractical to do at home (like real time video processing) are now easily done on common PCs.

Meanwhile, software for more mundane tasks has ballooned in inefficiency, causing them to take around the same time as they did before...

[NiHaoMike]

CPU cores have been bogged down between 3-4Ghz for a while now and integrating multiple cores has been the pathway to increased performance. There are physical limits to overcome in reducing transistor size which are proving difficult. Power consumption has and will continue to become a major focus.

My 3930k will do 3.8GHz continuous on all 6 cores (and 3.8GHz isn't even technically an overclock) on a now outdated 32nm process. On 22nm, breaking 4GHz should not be a problem.

In order for multiple core CPUs to be fully exploited we need software that is able to take advantage of them. It is all well and good to be able to run multiple programs and have them running alongside the program the user is directly interacting with but if the program is running on a single core then the user does not see the benefit of the full power of the CPU in terms of improved interactive response. I am not talking about  video encoding that can easily be scaled to multiple cores because even though doing it quickly is better, the user isn't sitting waiting for interactive response.

Turbo Boost is a way to speed up a few cores to improve overall performance when not all of the cores are used. It works great for mobile applications that are highly thermal limited, but a well designed desktop can hold full turbo on all cores indefinitely.

As you increase the number of cores then moving data around between the cores and synchronising the cores will start taking increasing space on the silicon. Doing that efficiently will be the next focus of CPU development, and software too. You will need operating systems that are more sophisticated at assigning threads to cores near where the necessary data is. The hiperthreading aware OS tries to do this on a rudimentary level now but as the number of cores increase it will be necessary to avoid giving work to a core that does not have ready access to the data. I am assuming that it will be too expensive in terms of silicon real estate to make every core access all cached data, and recharging a nearby cache will be inefficient and degrade performance.

They have had code for that in the kernel since the AMD64 days and they recently are working on improving it. Mostly a moot point for almost all home PCs since even the 6 core machines are not NUMA.
http://lwn.net/Articles/486858/

[ivan747]

Why hasn't anyone created an expansion card containing an advanced FPGA that can be reprogrammed to excel at certain task when needed? Example: 3D render needs extra power and requests the peripheral, loads it with a custom configuration optimized for every rendering step it does, then releases the peripheral when done.

[ivan747]

Eventually your smartphone will be able to easily stream HD video to a nearby TV/Monitor over some form of gigabit wireless.
(Some phones can kinda do it already using upnp servers but full HD quality is a bit much at the moment)

ie, You could check your email on the phone itself, Or you could sit down next to a bluetooth kbd/mouse and wifi monitor, swipe your phone over some RFID tag (to trigger autoconnect) and then work on more involved things like reading datasheets, routing circuit boards etc.. in a desktop style environment.

For general desktop email/web/document tasks phones have plenty of cpu power (or they will very soon)
However it will take quite a while before the latest computer games drop PC support for phones/pda.
It will probably happen though. For gaming you will pair your Oculus rift version 6 to your phone

Makes me wonder if people might end up walking around wearing some for of VR googles most of the time.
A high megapixel mounted camera would allow them to see with better than normal vision and would allow for google glass style OSD info, image zoom and all sorts of cool features.
It would have to be looked-on as "cool" to wear one though, before it would become popular, and that maybe a bit unrealistic.

Canonical want to do this with Ubuntu:
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone
specifically:
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/ubuntu-for-android

http://youtu.be/iv1Z7bf4jXY

[NiHaoMike]

Why hasn't anyone created an expansion card containing an advanced FPGA that can be reprogrammed to excel at certain task when needed? Example: 3D render needs extra power and requests the peripheral, loads it with a custom configuration optimized for every rendering step it does, then releases the peripheral when done.

They already exist, just a little expensive. For many applications, GPUs give more performance/$.

[c4757p]

Canonical want to do this with Ubuntu:
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone
specifically:
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/ubuntu-for-android

My god, haven't they tortured poor little Ubuntu enough in the past couple years? 

I guess I should have known where they were going when they slapped their little "me too" cell phone interface onto a desktop operating system... 

[c4757p]

To be serious, it actually looks kind of cool. I think they ruined the desktop system, though. 

[ConKbot]

Since battery technology development isnt pulling its share of the load, lower power is definitely the immediate future for laptop and mobile technology, and with the big push for green stuff, low power desktop units could benefit from it too.

[T4P]

Back in the day it was all about the clock speed, and overclocking. I went through all that.

Then it turned to multi-core CPUs. I currently have a 6-core Athlon, and haven't upgraded in about 3-4 years.

I used to keep up with the technology, but since it got so damn capable I just lost interest. So from you guys (and gals) in the know, where is the technology headed?

You mean phenoms. Not athlons. Desktop CPUs (at least on AMD) is headed to 10-core when Steamroller comes.
Decreased L3 cache latency increased IPC and built on 28nm process, it's a new arch.
On the other hand intel there's a rumor the next extreme edition is going to be a IB-E octa core, definitely going to be expensive
As for intel standard desktop procs it's all just quad-cores for now, they're shooting for lower and lower power consumption with haswell and onwards
Haswell only improved IPC by a tiny bit but the key thing is the FIVR (Integrated VRM but operates at 2.4V so you still need another VRM on board)

Yea that's cool - but I'm not talking footprint - I'm talking brute computing power. Where's the increase in computing power coming from in the next 5 - 10 years? 128 core CPUs or what?

Not cores but actually boosting IPC if they don't want to drop power consumption levels, right now AMD isn't as power hungry as Dave mentioned but that was probably Bulldozer and not Piledriver as the difference between 3570k and 8350 is just 50W. Drop it to 35-40W for 3770k

Don't we reach the limits of silicon pretty soon?  Doesn't the computer in a chip sort of become like a discreet component? We lump a bunch of them together in a machine with a screen you can actually see well.

People once said that 32nm is impossible and then said 22nm is impossible. Don't worry, intel will find a way 

Technology of what? PC CPUs? Current direction is GPU integration (APU)
GPU for symmetric multiprocessing is all the rage now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_computing

$100 GPU breaks 1 Teraflop while $200 CPU struggles at 100 Gigaflops.

Next step will be heavy usage of OpenCL enabled SoCs in smartphones (year? two?).

Yep, HSA.

I say if fedora picks up market share it's a wonderful contender. Why do we still have this windows garbage?
Supposedly Windows XP is the most efficient Windows ever and it's still NOT nearly as efficient as Fedora is (Which is linux, duh)

Since battery technology development isnt pulling its share of the load, lower power is definitely the immediate future for laptop and mobile technology, and with the big push for green stuff, low power desktop units could benefit from it too.

I couldn't for the life of me care much about laptop tech. Nor low power desktops. What's the point of low power desktops? I DON'T SEE IT.

[free_electron]

simply talking to my PC

talking ? why stop there. i want friggin telepathic interface. just hink what needs to be done and the computer goes off and does it. no need for keyboards, mice, displays. it's all directly overlayed over what you see.

we need telepathic fpga's. so we can think what it needs to do and it reconfigures itself. all chips would only need 2 pins. power and ground. they would communicate telepathically with us as well as amongst each other.

anything else is just make-do ..

[free_electron]

Why hasn't anyone created an expansion card containing an advanced FPGA that can be reprogrammed to excel at certain task when needed? Example: 3D render needs extra power and requests the peripheral, loads it with a custom configuration optimized for every rendering step it does, then releases the peripheral when done.

cray has een doing that for years on their XD and XR machines  opteronn 64 and a large xilinx fpga. a few thousand of them in a machine...
but lately they have moved away. gpu computeing is morepowerful for the same power draw and size.

now this is a computer :


that stuff makes my spine tingle... the moment you see them apply the logo is chiling... and then they start pumping refrigerant...

forget those losers with their overclocked watercooled hex core ... The machine above spits on that.

There's 2 things about cray :

1) The only thing faster than a Cray is a newer model Cray.
2) A Cray can run an endless loop in just under 4 hours...

here's another



the users manual of these machines begins with how much weight your floor is supposed to handle and how wide the driveway needs to be so they can get their trucks in to deliver the machines..

[free_electron]

and if you want to build a working replica of the orignal cray 1 from the 70's :

http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/

fits in a single fpga !

[Tepe]

What's the point of low power desktops? I DON'T SEE IT.

When it is responsible for a non-trivial part of your electricity bill you can...

[IanB]

What's the point of low power desktops? I DON'T SEE IT.

They are cool, quiet, and usually compact. In other words, convenient, unobtrusive, and economical to run.

[ivan747]

What's the point of low power desktops? I DON'T SEE IT.

They are cool, quiet, and usually compact. In other words, convenient, unobtrusive, and economical to run.

Just like a well designed laptop with a dock. Just the truth. Now the problem is most laptops are not well designed.

[saturation]

For the past decade the CPU market has been fragmenting: raw processing power, medium power, low power etc., and now the PC itself is too.  At onset the PC was the swiss army knife for data, now there is the laptop, smartphone or tablet to consider when the oft used application is best suited to that form factor, and portability.

The bottom line to all of us, is that CPU prices has not dropped as it used to be in the heydey of PCs.  My quad core q8200 CPU has actually appreciated to $160+ since I bought it, and while discontinued by Intel is still sold; my PC has actually appreciated in value, I paid $3400 for it, it was such a steal I bought 2 back in 2007 2010; an equivalent PC today cost > $600 each using a similarly capable CPU.

I suggest if you are a power user: CAD/CAM, simulation, graphics, multimedia editing particularly video, you either own today or should get a capable desktop now as prices will only continue to rise as the tablet and laptop market continue to erode the PC market share, so few deals will be had from hereon in.

[Rasz]

My quad core q8200 CPU has actually appreciated to $160+ since I bought it

and yet it is slower than $80 Pentium G870. You cant really base comparison of old technology on price. People are irrational and will pay more for something that they feel is better value, not something that categorically is better value.