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Subject: Re: To SMP or not to SMP what's the answer?

Author: Charles Worthington

Date: 20:04:17 04/12/03

Go up one level in this thread


On April 11, 2003 at 21:39:55, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On April 11, 2003 at 18:07:30, Charles Worthington wrote:
>
>>On April 11, 2003 at 06:37:41, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>
>>>On April 11, 2003 at 00:31:52, Charles Worthington wrote:
>>>
>>>>On April 11, 2003 at 00:09:23, Jay Urbanski wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>It's simply wrong, or you have deliberately chosen to ignore all consumer
>>>>>>electronic devices and most PCs.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I don't even know if the vast majority of processor produced in the world are 16
>>>>>>bits or 32 bits ones. Maybe the majority is 8 bits processors.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>Perhaps if you include all embedded processors in the world.. but even that's
>>>>>doubtful.  But on the other hand I doubt your car or your refrigerator are going
>>>>>to be running a chess engine.
>>>>>
>>>>>SMP / SMT processing is definitely on the rise and you *will* see it become much
>>>>>more common on both the desktop and general purpose server machines.  IBM's
>>>>>POWER4 is already SMP on a chip, Itanium will be soon, as will Opteron in a few
>>>>>years.  Intel will follow suit on the desktop as they have with Hyperthreading
>>>>>already.  It's a cheap way to get more processing power out of the available
>>>>>silicon - so why not?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Not to mention the fact that they will soon reach a ceiling on how much speed
>>>>they can get out of a single cpu and once that happens multiprocessing will no
>>>>longer be a luxury...it will be a necessity.
>>>
>>>I disagree here. So far there is no indication they will reach a ceiling.
>>>
>>>SMT/HT is a big sales argument and it is possible to make it now because we are
>>>nowadays at 0.13 micron. In 0.18 or .35 micron this would have been harder to do
>>>against the same price.
>>
>>
>>
>>Actually there is no choice but for them to reach a ceiling eventually...They
>
>that is a very cheap statement to do actually.
>
>So far they managed to get faster each 2 years about 2 times. Overall seen even
>more than that.
>
>So many things can get improved IPC can get improved. caches. Prediction
>algorithms. All very hard to improve but they will improve all bit by bit.
>
>when hardware gets very tiny then i love to see 32 cpu's at a single
>processor-die :)
>
>>are limited by the size of the atom and other factors such as conductivity which
>>are controlled by the laws of physics. No matter how smart the engineers are the
>>current technology does in fact have limits....They are the_laws_of
>>physics...not the_theory_of physics.
>>
>>respectfully, Charles


Yes i agree that there is still significant room for improvement. However, it is
still a question of which will come first....The technology to improve single
cpu's or the need to move on to multiprocessing in order to get the performance
increases that the public have become accustomed to. If multiprocessing winds up
being the solution then the cost of dual cpu systems will drop dramatically as
they become commonplace. Right now it is looking like a toss up as to which will
come first. Personally I am hoping to see the improvements in the single cpu's
because then that will make them all the more deadly in the multiprocessor
systems. Eventually, however, there is still a ceiling that will have to one day
be dealt with by multiprocessing or a completely new technology which does not
rely on the transistor.



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