Re: Print to SHR

["Payton Byrd" <plbyrd@bellsouth.no.spam.net>]

"Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote in message v4GdnVOhTYkQ7XPYnZ2dnUVZ_vGinZ2d@comcast.com">news:v4GdnVOhTYkQ7XPYnZ2dnUVZ_vGinZ2d@comcast.com...
> Payton Byrd wrote:
>> 
>> "Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote in message ap-dnce4UZBwU3DYnZ2dnUVZ_sCinZ2d@comcast.com">news:ap-dnce4UZBwU3DYnZ2dnUVZ_sCinZ2d@comcast.com...
>> 
>>>William Garber wrote:
>>>While Moore's "Law" has pretty much petered out for improvements
>>>of single-thread processor performance
>> 
>> 
>> Evidently you haven't seen a Core 2 Duo in action.  It's about 40 to 180% faster than the Netburst architecture at the same clock speed per thread.
> 
> *At the same clock speed*--but clock speeds are no longer increasing
> exponentially--closer to logarithmically.  ;-)

Moore's Law has nothing to do with clock speed.  

> 
> The improvement you quote at the same clock speed is a measure of the
> improved efficiency of the microarchitecture, which the netburst
> microarchitecture had thrown away to gain marketing megahertz.

You're citing the exact reason why the silicon world refocused on what Moore's Law really means.


> 
> (BTW, the *big* numbers, like 180% are a case of either very
> specialized loopy code or cases where the working set of the code
> now fits in the 4MB cache, when it didn't before.  The sustained
> throughput improvements due to microarchitecture are more in the
> 30%-40% range.)

The improvements in manufacturing which come through Moore's Law are the reason you can put 4MB of cache on a CPU.  You are citing exactly why Moore's Law is alive and well.

> 
> Many other microarchitectures, AMD and PowerPC among them, had achieved
> the Core 2 efficiency several years ago--this is just a case of Intel
> finally getting the word.

No, Core 2 is way beyond the efficiency level of Athlon, go read the real-world benchmarks <http://www.tomshardware.com>. PowerPC has never been at the processing efficiency of the Intel processors.  Just because PowerPC can run X instructions compared to Y instructions on Intel is irrelevant when a job requires 300X for every 50Y.  RISC is dying, at least in the high-performance market.  Sun is keeping it alive through massive parallelism, but as Intel and AMD catches up to the levels of Parallelism used by Niagara, RISC will become more and more marginalized.  From a pure efficiency standpoint nothing is even close to Itanium in per-thread performance and Intel is hell-bent on getting that performance into X86-64.
> 
> For this to be a part of a Moore's "Law"-like advance, there must be
> a succession of "encores" to this microarchitecture improvement that
> continue to deliver more performance at the (slowly increasing) clock
> speed.  Don't count on that--particularly from Intel.

You're sounding very biased against Intel and unrealistic about both Moore's Law and Intel's products.  Moore's Law has nothing to do with increasing clock speed, and everything to do with enabling more powerful CPU's through better utilization of the space provided in a relatively-sized slice of semiconductor.  If you don't think that Intel's not doing a great job of pushing the envelope then you aren't paying attention.  Right now they're spanking everyone else in the CPU industry through sheer engineering prowess.  I challenge you to find any PC that can outrun a 2.8 GHZ Core 2 Duo, even in a single threaded application.  The only chance would be to take an Athlon FX-62 and put it under extreme nitrogen cooling to over clock it to about 4.5 ghz.

> 
>>>the hard disk guys continue
>>>to out-run Moore with density and speed improvements.
>> 
>> 
>> Moore's Law just says that every 24 months the size of transisters will be halved.  This has held true and continues to hold true.  Performance does not scale directly with feature size because the interconnects between the features is already a minimal portion of the time it takes the electrons to move around the CPU.  Also, Intel's 45nm process uses some new materials that they say will be good down to 15nm.  Below that you're into nanotechnology and the carbon nanotube industry is already churning out usable chips for tech samples and there are even quantum computing systems starting to come online through carbon nanotube technology.  No, Moore's law isn't slowing down at all, it's actually accelerating considering the recent advances in nanotechnology.
> 
> But from the mid-1980s to 2000, that increase in density was directly
> translated into performance doubling, about half of it directly from
> clock speed improvement (smaller transistors) and half of it from
> increased single-thread parallelism (more transistors).
> 
> Now, we've reached the practical limit for rapid improvements in
> either one of these.  Power limitations prevent large processor chips
> from significantly increasing their clock speeds, and we've about
> emptied the well of improvements in single-thread parallelism,
> so more transistors doesn't deliver much more sequential performance.

The first paragraph represents possible outcomes of the application of Moore's Law.  The second paragraph represents a biased and uninformed opinion of the current state of the application of Moore's Law.  Moore's Law is still going strong and working just the way Gordon Moore predicted.  What's different is that the manufacturers are applying it to allow new techniques and technologies that weren't feasible in the 80's and 90's.  You're statement about single-threaded parallelism is wrong; there's still lots of headroom for single-threaded performance.  Core 2 is a much better single-threaded CPU than anything else.  It can also handle clock speeds above 4 Ghz with stock coolers.  The limiting reagent is memory as the memory clock has to be increased proportionally with the CPU speed or you need more cache.  When 45nm products hit the stores this year you'll see another round of bigger caches per core and thus more single-threaded performance with the current memory technology.  If you want to know what's really holding back performance, it's not physics.  Go do some research on what has happened to Rambus when they tried to put faster memory into the market.  The memory mafia went to work with their price fixing and has set the entire industry back 10 years on that front.

> 
> The only way to exploit more transistors now is with larger caches
> (diminishing returns) and more cores (plays to our weakness in
> designing, programming, debugging, and scaling parallel programs).

Whether or not we have a weakness in programming and debugging parallel systems doesn't mean that Moore's Law is running out of steam.  It means that we haven't put the time, energy, and money into education the last 50 years to keep up with technology.

> 
> Silicon chips are *already* nanotechnology, and quantum computing
> is still a lab curiosity--and will remain so for at least another
> decade.  Look at how long it takes a lab technology to show up in
> shippable products.

The current accepted standard for nanotechnology is products with features less than 10nm.  It won't be until after the 15nm generation that we officially get into that territory.  I believe Intel's (and IBM/AMD as well) roadmap puts us there in 6 years... right on schedule according to Moore's Law.

> 
> I'm not saying that it isn't possible to build better things--of
> course it is--but the time and capital to do it is *very* large,
> and it isn't at all clear how that investment is going to be
> financed ten years from now by selling what have *already* become
> commodity chips.

The investment does continue to increase, but the end product continually gets cheaper.  This is yet another function of Moore's Law and has been since day one.

> 
> The industry model is currently unstable.

I disagree.  We've lost DEC and Motorola as major CPU companies, but we've gained AMD and Fujitsu.  The industry is stable, it's a few of the companies that are changing.  This happens in even the most stable economies.  The fact that there is change is sign of a very healthy market.

> 
>>>The silicon run was good while it lasted, but we're having to
>>>work hard for the last order of magnitude these days.  As the
>>>rate of improvement slows and the required capital investment
>>>soars, the whole "wait 'til next year if you can't afford it"
>>>mentality is due for a sea change.
>> 
>> 
>> Sorry, I just don't see this.  The reality of the market is much different.  AMD/IBM has managed to accelerate their product process generations because of materials advances and will have 45nm products in production on store shelves less than 2 years after their introduction of 65nm products.
> 
> I agree that the silicon technologists are finding ways to keep
> the density increasing, but the price for each doubling of density
> is also doubling, and we don't have the knowledge to translate
> those higher densities into higher throughput on things that
> customers care about enough to buy them.  That's the problem.

I don't understand the argument.  I care about having fast, mutli-threaded systems that don't make me feeling like I'm wading through a marsh pit when I click an icon.  The market is filling this need with aplomb.  I've been using dual-processor machines since 1997 for my desktop because of the advantages.  Now I use dual-core machines and enjoy the reduction in complexity, cost, noise, and heat that the current generation provides.  Even two of my laptops are dual-core and they get better battery life and produce less heat than my single-core laptop from the previous chip generation.

> 
> Remember when it was exciting to see the succession of new chip
> generations and the new applications that they enabled?  Notice
> how long it's been since that was the case?

I'm more excited about processors now than I ever have been.  Multi-core and multi-threaded is a far better computing model than single-threaded.  We do not live in a single-threaded world or universe.  If we ignore this we set ourselves up for absolutely failure.

> 
>>>If it weren't for massive consolidation and the cost reductions
>>>that come from economies of scale, things would be even dryer in
>>>silicon valley.
>> 
>> 
>> This is actually a function of Moore's Law.  This is also what killed Commodore as they didn't invest into MOS Technologies as they should have then they got left behind.  At the end they were depending on a 12 year old computer with a 20 year old CPU that was still manufactured as if it were 1982 all over again.
> 
> Exactly.  Moore's "Law" is a virtuous economic cycle, and if you
> don't keep the pump primed, it stops pumping.  The pump is running
> a lot slower these days, and there are lots of bubbles inside...
> 
> If it doesn't get a lot better soon, it will get worse.

I really don't see the problem.  I honestly get the feeling that your favorite CPU (PowerPC?) is loosing economically and thus you think the industry is broken.  It's not broken, it's working exactly as it's supposed to.  

> 
> -michael
> 
> NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
> Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
> 
> "The wastebasket is our most important design
> tool--and it's seriously underused."