'Superbrain chip' on the way

[DesertFox]

Semiconductor designers from International Business Machines, Sony and Toshiba will reveal on Monday the inner workings of a “supercomputer on a chip” they claim could revolutionise communications, multimedia and consumer electronics.

The Cell microprocessor has been under development by the three companies since 2001 in a laboratory in Austin, Texas.

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20050207/capt.caps10202071926.cell_processor_caps102.jpg

Its unveiling at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco has been eagerly awaited and products containing Cell including Sony's PlayStation 3 games console are expected as early as next year.

Advance reports suggest the chip is significantly more powerful and versatile than the next generation of micro-processors announced by the consortium's competitors, Intel and AMD.

The two leading chipmakers are just moving from 32-bit to 64-bit computing and to dual-core processors essentially two “brains” on a single chip.Cell is understood to have at least four cores and be significantly faster than Intel and AMD chips.

More (http://news.ft.com/cms/s/6b31ebfe-786b-11d9-9961-00000e2511c8.html)

[DoctorDoom]

And the speed race goes on, and still the bottle neck is the hard drive, that mechanical device that can't go much faster because the laws of physics impose the limits. It's equivalent to buying a Lamborghini Countach for city driving.

I'll be impressed when the rest of the computer can keep up with the CPU(s).

[whipple]

The harddrives only a bottle neck if you have very little RAM. Whack a couple of Gig in and you got yourself an autobahn. Sure there's still a little delay while everything loads into memory but hey 'its the tingle of anticipation'.

[DoctorDoom]

It depends on the program. I have 512 MB in this box, and seldom do I come close to using all of it. That's the province of power-users with their video editing, DTP and 100,000-cell spreadsheet packages.

If a program is disk-intensive, nothing will accelerate it. IAC, I'm expecting fully solid-state "hard drives" with several hundred gigs of NVRAM capable of loading and saving at hundreds of MB per second. The physical hard drive will be consigned to bulk storage.

When the OS boots in a couple of seconds after the POST beep, then PCs will have arrived in the 21st century. When Word is ready to go before your finger is off of the mouse button, that's progress.

The ultimate barrier is the speed of light. In the GHz CPU range, the length of the pc-board runs becomes a significant factor in timing. At 1 GHz, the period is one nanosecond, during which light moves only about 11.8 inches. At 5 GHz, it's 2.36 inches. Etcetera. Inasmuch as the clock pulses control timing, delay between a clock at the CPU and the same clock at, e.g., the RAM on another part of the mobo, will adversely affect sync.

The final solution is the PC on a chip, with everything in one massively integrated circuit package, including the NVRAM "hard drive". Only outside-world signals such as video will enter and leave the chip.

And when all this happens, it will prove what? The vast majority of non-business machine owners will still use their boxes for Web-surfing, email, and Solitaire. IMO, only the geeks have a need for speed. Aunt Mabel emailing her nephew doesn't.

[RayChuang]

And the speed race goes on, and still the bottle neck is the hard drive, that mechanical device that can't go much faster because the laws of physics impose the limits. It's equivalent to buying a Lamborghini Countach for city driving.


That was true in the past, but with today's hard drive spinning at 7200 RPM, having 8 to 16 megabytes of memory cache on the hard drive itself and the use of high speed interface connections such as ATA-100/133, Serial ATA and UltraSCSI 160/320, disk access is VASTLY faster than just even a few years ago.

Indeed, there has been major emphasis on speeding up the rest of the computer outside of the CPU in the last few years. Besides the hard disk drive speed improvements I mentioned above, graphics card speed have gone up significantly thanks to faster interfaces such as AGP 8x and the new PCI Express standard, there are new chips on the motherboard with far faster data access between motherboard chips, RAM speeds have dramatically increased thanks to the use of double-data rate SDRAM (DDR-SDRAM) and external data connections have also increased thanks to USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394 ("Firewire") standards.

Yes, all of these standards sound like gobbly-gook but the result is that today's computers are vastly faster than in the past even with relatively slow CPU's.