RC Transmission Lines (Wafer-Scale)

Whatzisname's law: All computers wait at the same speed.

Done the simple-minded way (the way I'd like to do it if I could), one device design comes out as something like

10**9 cells x 32 bytes x 2 FLOP/byte x 200 steps/cycle x 100 cycles/run x 100 runs/design =~ 10**17 operations

per design, running in about 32 gig of memory. Could take awhile, even on a fast parallel machine. The 200 steps/cycle number is needed only when using silver--because the real part of its index of refraction is only about 0.1, so the phase velocity in silver is almost 10 times c.

PCs are already less exciting than toasters--in both good and bad senses. My microprocessor-controlled toaster has buttons for toasting bagels and frozen bread, which usually more or less work if it starts out cold, but I never used to worry about my mechanical toaster crashing and having to be rebooted (which happens about once a week with this one). My cluster needs rebooting about twice a year, but doesn't make good toast.

Commoditization is the eventual fate of just about every technology, and the whole industry has been scrambling for many years to stay high on the food chain. IBM gave up making displays, PCs, and disc drives mostly for that reason.

On the other hand, having the best-performing and most reliable servers is really important to us, partly because of the price premium, but also because it drags along a lot of software and consulting revenue. That's one reason that I've been working on high performance, low power optical interconnections: in a highly multiprocessor world, bandwidth needs to grow at least as the square of the number of processor cores if you're going to keep tight coupling between cores. That tight coupling is really important because most applications don't parallelize terribly well, and tight coupling is the only way to keep the average performance up. Tightly coupled machines are dramatically easier to program, which is another way of saying the same thing.

It's the software fads that will keep CPU demand going...it's amazing how many computrons you can soak up by using the revolutionary interpreted language-du-jour. Good luck running anything written in Java on even a vanilla Pentium. (Remember when everybody made fun of Intel for that name?)

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

We still program our test racks under DOS, using either a rackmount PC or a VME embedded processor. The resulting programs are realtime to the microsecond.

John

more and more of the silicon is being used to overcome bottlenecks elsewhere, it doesnt actually do any more processing just tries to keep the very fast core ocupied. if only we could make use of more distributed processing each core wouldnt need to be as fast and so could use much less silicon.

microcontollers easily manage 40mips+ and they run so cool they dont need any heatsink. im sure a modern disc drive could run something like msdos on its own.

nothing can be done about it though as there is no incentive to develop distributed software as there is little distributed hardware, and so there is no incentive to develop the hardware as there is no software.

Colin =^.^=

You are the one who brougth up "2^10 core CPUs." Is that not "specialized hardware for specialized applications?"

You think a quad core PC 48 can inspect every packet coming in from each of 48 separate gigabit ethernet ports?

Agains i say, some computers are not PCs. Some computers are routers with 48 separate gigabit ethernet ports and a requirement to inspect every packet coming in from every port.

--
Guy Macon

Cluck..cluck...good old chicken and egg problem....cluck....cluck...

** Check. Methinks you mention some of those, especially below.

Robert Baer snipped-for-privacy@localnet.com posted to sci.electronics.design:

Gee, i have only been bit once, though i was bit hard. And it was back when Win98SE was popular and i was still using it regularly.

I doubt that you could survive some of the nasty places that i have explored. Not that you would ever go there in the first place, but i am much too curious for my own good.