Where to in the future?

[perplex]

I think I remember reading a quote from an Intel official saying we would see tens or hundreds of cores 10 years from now.

What do you guys think? I think we'll see tens or hundreds, but with clock speeds consistently decreasing as new architectures are developed (For example P4 to Conroe). So architecture increasing in efficiency and clock speed decreasing. Also constantly decreasing power levels. The power consumption is what interests me the most

Just imagine dozens of simultaneous threads. Seems like a software nightmare though

 

[SSE4]

It does seem like a software nightmare to me to be honest, splitting all that software up - but I am about as far from a programmer as you can get, so...

Personally I can see tens but hundreds... I guess it'd really depend. Something about 100 2GHz (Or even 1GHz) cores screams "OMG GIVE ME POWER!" To the power where I'd almost be thinking we'd see CPUs with their own PSU. But with the way they're going now - trying to keep lower power consumption and temperatures - I think we could definitely be seeing tens of cores for sure. Software development is going to have a heck of a time keeping up so that we keep all those cores fed - but it's just interesting to think about it. Wondering how things will be when we start scaling down to less than 45nm... Pretty tiny stuff!

 

[perplex]

But if we get to 100 cores I really doubt they'll be running at x GHz clockspeeds, maybe in the low hundreds (or lower) MHz. The architecture's efficiency will make up for the clock speeds, just like Conroe "will" make up for the lower clock speeds in comparison to P4's architecture.

And yeah, I can't wait for <45nm to see how cores increase and other architectures - However maybe the most interesting thing at the moment is to see how the software industry copes with the increase in cores. I hope with Vista we'll see software companies take it even more seriously.

I want the industry to go back to passively cooled CPUs

 

[SSE4]

But if we get to 100 cores I really doubt they'll be running at x GHz clockspeeds, maybe in the low hundreds (or lower) MHz. The architecture's efficiency will make up for the clock speeds, just like Conroe "will" make up for the lower clock speeds in comparison to P4's architecture.

And yeah, I can't wait for <45nm to see how cores increase and other architectures - However maybe the most interesting thing at the moment is to see how the software industry copes with the increase in cores. I hope with Vista we'll see software companies take it even more seriously.

I want the industry to go back to passively cooled CPUs

I just feel that at those low speeds, that'd be a real heck of a nightmare for software. We're talking like, one thread per CPU kind of thing.

I'm definitely the most interested to see software catching up in two threads - let alone keeping up with quad-core etc. Yeah. I'd be concerned with the price though too - I mean, taking up 2/10ths of a wafer all by yourself? I'm a little optimistic, but a bit cautious about how things will go. I mean, we already know that current dual-cores are basically one core multiplied by two for the price.

 

[empoy]

i'm dreaming of a customizable microprocessor. sort of like a multicore processor with each specialized core and scalable enough to be built as per customer's need.

for games: 3 integer/fpu cores + 1 general purpose core
for multimedia: 2 long pipeline cores + 1 general purpose core