Jorge ChB wrote:
mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote:Now that extremely cheap machines can manipulate high definition AV content in better than realtime, we're running out of reasons to makefaster machines.This is a good thing, in many ways.Wow wait ! What are you saying ? A good thing in what way ? More MIPS + less Watts + smaller. That's what hardware designers are after and will always be after. That's been the key to now-possible before-unthinkable everyday things like mobiles, ipods, psps, palms, dvb tv, ABS, EFI, portables, google earth, WIFI, etc etc. A microprocessor everywhere. And that's the key to many unthinkable wonderful new inventions that have to come yet and won't be possible unless the hardware keeps evolving == (More MIPS + less Watts + smaller)
Absolutely right. But the game is about to get much harder, in the sense that silicon feature sizes are already approaching the point where silicon looks like swiss cheese, making further improvements by simple scaling quite difficult. The game is getting harder and *much* more expensive, so progress is slower (note the lack of 2x speed increases for the last few years) and the number of different players is decreasing. The big "open door" opportunity is multiprocessor parallelism, but we have invested so little in learning to apply parallelism that it remains esoteric. (But AppleCrate makes it easy to experiment with! ;-) The popular "thread" model, in which all of memory is conceptually shared by all threads, is a disaster for real multiprocessors, since they will *always* have latency and bandwidth issues to move data between them, and a "single, coherent memory image" is both slow and wasteful.
The only lack "of reasons to make faster machines" I can think of comes from the fact that the software is evolving at a so *much* slower pace (than hardware)... Voice recognition ? "Artificial Intelligence" ? User (human) interface ? etc... :-(
Yes, there is much to be done--and very slow progress. What is needed is breakthrough *algorithmic* work, not *tools* work. -michael Parallel computing for 8-bit Apple II's! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it is seriously underused."