I just came across an article the other day which said the speed and latency of a processor would eventually stop increasing when approaching the speed of light. I forgot where I found it But I think this is why Intel is taking Core approach rather than increasing the new processor's frequencies. Any comments? Thanks Jack
The point in valid, but even well before the speed of light limits what you can do, you start having to make transistors so thin to further increase clock rates that leakage currents become a significant problem; this translates directly into wasted energy, which is annoying (big fans required) for desktop PCs and even more debilitating for laptops.
Another problem that Intel (and everyone else making CPUs) has is that the only way to increase throughput once you've hit the fastest frequency your process allows is to process multiple instructions in parallel (this is called "instruction level parallelism" and has been gong on for decades now), but processors are good enough today that often there simply aren't any more instructions within a single thread of execution to be had, because they're all blocked waiting on, e.g., main memory access, which is literally hundreds of times slower than cache memory access. (Entertaining exercise: Turn off all the caches in your CPU. It will litterally *crawl*, operating at least
10x slower than usual.) So... where can you look for more instructions to execute simultaneously? How about another thread? That's the ticket -- this gets you "thread level parallelism," and it's exactly what Intel's dual-core CPUs do.---Joel Kolstad
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