When Will Desktop Chips Hit 15 GHz?

[Jason Dunn]

<a href="http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,106241,tk,dn102302X,00.asp">http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,106241,tk,dn102302X,00.asp</a><br /><br />CPU speeds continue to skyrocket upward, but can you imagine a 15 GHz CPU? We'll need to continue to expand the speed of other components as well to keep up with that - AMDs HyperTransport technology is a step in the right direction, but we'll need to see a radical improvement in hard drive speed as well before we'll see the benefits of a CPU this fast.<br /><br />"Users can expect to see the processing speed of Intel's desktop processors hit 15 GHz and that of wireless device and PDA processors hit 5 GHz by 2010, the chip maker's chief technology officer said in Tokyo on Wednesday. The 15-GHz desktop chip, some five times as fast as the company's soon-to-be-launched 3-GHz Pentium 4 chip, will pack one billion transistors, said Pat Gelsinger, vice president and chief technology officer of Intel as he delivered a keynote address to the company's Intel Developer Forum Japan conference in Tokyo."<br /><br />The article goes on to talk about the challenges in getting higher speeds out of wireless and PDA CPUs:<br /><br />"...In the wireless and PDA space, Gelsinger said, the company is expecting to see speeds rise from the current 400 MHz to 5 GHz over the same eight-year period of time..."Desktops today are [consuming power of] 75 to 100 watts and when you go to handheld devices you are typically operating at less than 1 watt," said Gelsinger. "Obviously, you are optimizing the design for different criteria. So today, if I was going to look at a StrongArm core or XScale core, could I create a 2-GHz or 3-GHz XScale today? Absolutely. Could I do so and deliver the best trade-off of power and performance inside a 1-watt envelope? No. You tend to design the chips differently to live inside different devices."

[mookie123]

On other news, government decides to ban these chips because they have higher thermal signiture than a small intercontinental ballistic missile, not to mention the global warming effect from such concentrated energy burst and the need of one mini nuclear powerplant to run each of this chip.


..but you can get 55,471 fps on quake.

[nirav28]

Sooner than 2010, if moore's law holds up..and CPU clock speeds double every 18 months...currently we're at 2.8 ghz..by mid summer 2004 we're looking at almost 5 ghz. early 2006 ..we're going to see 8ghz to 10 ghz...so by 2008 we should have a 15 ghz cpu available.


But i think..CPU speeds are high enough right now. Considering that majority of the people barely use all of the cpu horse power available to them. Maybe the hardcore gamers do or the graphic/video artist.

What are we going to do with a 15 ghz cpu?

[thadrool]

Agreed. My 1 ghz laptop is suiting me just fine and there's just about nothing I do on a computer that needs more speed.

In the realm of speed, I'd be more interested in faster HD access times and faster wireless transfer rates via mobile devices. Perhaps when voice recognition and other revolutionary ideas become a staple of computing will we need anything faster than what we've currently got.

[egads]

Double the processor speed and hardly anyone will notice. Now, double the harddisk access speed and EVERYONE will notice. The harddrive makers are making the IDE/SCSI interfaces faster but I don't think any great strides have been made in how fast you get data off of the media.

I'd love to see a HD with a few hundred micro second average seek time but I don't think we'll see them any time soon if not ever...

[blade_of_narsil]

With that CPU power we will play games that have realistic physics, talking to each other, using voice commands, having a couple of cameras track our movements, battle with and against some quality AI, and then super textures to make things reallistic. Doing all that in a game requires some major cycles. Not to mention a 10 GHz video card with 2 gigs of ram.
Thats my next point. Ram is getting so cheap, and if they have the ram that is non-volitle, then why not just store things on RAM memory. Sure 1 terabyte HD would be great, but the access on things in RAM will beat any storage media. Give me a 5 gigs of RAM that I could store things to. Not many people remember, but on Macs you can (or used to could) make a RAM disk and store and read from it.
Same story for a ppc, non-voilite ram means you can have gigs on your handheld, with-out the power issues.
my $.02

[vincentsiaw]

what aplication do we, as normal user need to use 15 ghz processor? i still wondering what we could do with 15 ghz processor? :?:

[Rirath]

I'm kinda sick of hearing the "why would we need it" talks. How on earth can so many people be so short sighted? :evil:

We're not talking about 15ghz computers tomorrow folks, we're talking about them 8 years from now. Better make that 10 before I could afford one. Don't look blindly at your desktop today and say you'll never use it. That's every bit as foolish as looking at your computer 10 years ago and saying it's all you ever need.

Personally, I use every bit of juice my comp can give me, and 10 years from now I plan to do the same. If you can't keep up, then that just means you're gonna have some really cheap computers to look forward to.

[wizardmaster2k]

Rirath, spoken like a true pc addict. i love my comp, 10 years from now, i will love my new comp. as long as software and hardware keep up with each other, it will all be fine.

[nirav28]

Thats my next point. Ram is getting so cheap, and if they have the ram that is non-volitle, then why not just store things on RAM memory. Sure 1 terabyte HD would be great, but the access on things in RAM will beat any storage media. Give me a 5 gigs of RAM that I could store things to. Not many people remember, but on Macs you can (or used to could) make a RAM disk and store and read from it.
Same story for a ppc, non-voilite ram means you can have gigs on your handheld, with-out the power issues.
my $.02

Well you can do that right now. For example, I have 1.5 gig of DDR ram on my primary workstation that I use for developing/coding, graphics and gaming. (I bought it last year when ram was really really really cheap)But I was rarely using more than 1 gig..so what do i do with the unused ram? Well I created a 1 gig ram drive using RamDiskPro for xp. XP treats the ram drive as any other drive. Ramdiskpro has a nifty feature where you can install a application on your ram disk and when before you shutdown my pc, it will write that installation to a IDE harddrive..the benifit of this is , that applications like photoshop will open up in less than 5 secs. Also..it comes in handy when do video capturing. No more dropped frames even when capturing high res video.

I also agree..instead of increasing cpu speed, tech companies should focus more on bringing more usuability to current technologies..such as Harddrive seek time , Faster wireless, and better intuitive voice regcognition. Basically better through put on a motherboard would help.
I don't want virtual reality type technology or facial regcognition technology that a lot of futurist are predicting. I just care about improving existing technology such as the things mentioned above.


As for gaming performance increase..well video graphics cards are already doing that and most of the cpu load is being handled by them. Video cards will only get better over time.

[Timothy Rapson]

In 2002 no one should even know what a RAM disk is. The OS shoulc take care of caching to ram whatever it has room for and so make everything run faster. Unfortunately, this is not always so smartly done.


5-15 GZ? I think Intel is looking the wrong way when they look at mobile processors just like they do desktops.

The technology like moving from 25 microns to 14 microns (hope I have that term right) allows more speed, but could it not also allow keeping the same speed but making the die far smaller and maybe far more power effecient?

My bet is that the company that comes out with a mobile processor that runs the same speed as the 206 MZ StrongARM, but reduces power use by algebraic factors every 2 years will be better for us than on that goes faster and uses the same juice. I for one would far rather pay more for smaller sized PDA with better battery life than one running video clips (which I don't really do) at 54 frames per second.

Then again, if they must make them run at 5 GZ, and they costs no more, what do I care.

[Newsboy]

Fast Forward to 2010:

All desktop computers look like cars from the 1940s, with large chrome grills shielding massive radiators from prying fingers. Instead of 30,000 mile service, you will have 30 day fluid changes, and every 60 days will have to replace the air filters and drive belts for the cooling pumps.

Users in Alaska and Colorado will have trouble getting their computers to start, but once running, they will run cooler than any other part of the US. Users in Hawaii will have to throttle processors back to 7.5 Ghz.

"Is that a PocketPC you have in there, or are your pants on fire?"

[Rirath]

:lol: Well put Newsboy.

[Certified Optimist]

There is no such thing as too much speed...

I remember "back in the days" when our teacher held up a 1.4MB floppy and told us "There is soooooo much space on this one... You'll be able to save all the papers you will ever write on it...". This one floppy was all we would need throughout the whole of college... Right.

By the time these processors arrive you can be sure that the OS + applications available will be more bloated than ever... Office 98 versus Office XP... can you spot the difference... Yeah, some... but mainly more "fluffy" menues + "pretty" features... Crashes about the same amount of times as it used to...

Add more features => Same speed even though you've got faster processors... So... there is always a need for more speed.

[techie]

Never underestimate the ability of MS to fill however many CPU cycles you have.

This is some corrolory of 'work expanding to fill time available' I guess.

All I can say is bring on the 15 GHz.

[Pony99CA]

Sooner than 2010, if moore's law holds up..and CPU clock speeds double every 18 months...currently we're at 2.8 ghz..by mid summer 2004 we're looking at almost 5 ghz. early 2006 ..we're going to see 8ghz to 10 ghz...so by 2008 we should have a 15 ghz cpu available.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who wondered about this. Assuming we get the 3 GHz CPU in 2003, by 2009 we should have a CPU running 16 times as fast, or 48 GHz.

Maybe Intel is trying to scale back our expectations.... :?:

Steve

[Pony99CA]

There is no such thing as too much speed...

I remember "back in the days" when our teacher held up a 1.4MB floppy and told us "There is soooooo much space on this one... You'll be able to save all the papers you will ever write on it...". This one floppy was all we would need throughout the whole of college... Right.
Prognostications are often way off.

Didn't Bill Gates once say that nobody would ever need more than 640KB of RAM? :lol:

Also, I believe that former IBM chairman Thomas Watson, Jr. once said that the market for computers was in the single-digits. (He was referring to mainframes, I know, but they sold more than he predicted very quickly.)

But it works both ways, too. Where are our flying cars and video phones? (Yes, I know you can get a video phone, but who would you use it with? :lol:)

In entertainment, look at a series like "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" (set in the mid-70s) or "Space: 1999" (set in guess where?) as other examples of overly optimistic predictions. Even "2001" was way off on both space travel and computer intelligence. :-(

Steve

[nirav28]

Damnit..I wanted a flying car, and also to be able to take a vacation on the moon! They promised us this! In those stupid films we saw in grade school. I think humanity got suckered. We're going to have 15 ghz procs and we still can't put a explorer on mars without smacking it into the ground.

And I agree..Microsoft will always find a way to take up those cpu cycles and disk space with ever increasing bloatware. Has anyone taken a look at the basic install of Windows Xp pro? Its like over a gig!!!

[Jason Dunn]

Has anyone taken a look at the basic install of Windows Xp pro? Its like over a gig!!!

Have you noticed yet that XP has built-in drivers for a huge array of hardware and doesn't ask for the CD like previous operating systems did? That's a big reason for the size of the install - they include a BIG gob of drivers. You can't even find a new PC with less than a 20 GB hard drive now anyway - what's the big deal with 1 GB install?

[Janak Parekh]

Have you noticed yet that XP has built-in drivers for a huge array of hardware and doesn't ask for the CD like previous operating systems did? That's a big reason for the size of the install - they include a BIG gob of drivers. You can't even find a new PC with less than a 20 GB hard drive now anyway - what's the big deal with 1 GB install?
Actually, the "driver cache" functionality in XP started in W2k. Both have a massive driver.cab file in the \Windows (\WINNT) directory. Best thing they did in a long time - I used to copy the CD, kit and kaboodle, every time. The driver.cab for XP is ~ 75MB, btw...

XP has a lot of other stuff too, a lot of which is useful. But yeah, I wouldn't worry about disk space either. Hard disks are so incredibly cheap nowadays, and the tech is far outstripping demand.

--bdj

[Janak Parekh]

Never underestimate the ability of MS to fill however many CPU cycles you have.

This is some corrolory of 'work expanding to fill time available' I guess.

All I can say is bring on the 15 GHz.
True to some extent, but we will hit other bottlenecks much sooner. In particular, RAM technology is improving fairly slow compared to CPU's. We've been adding L1, L2, and even L3 caches; every time there's diminishing returns.

But yes, the presence of faster components in a PC forces the ones behind to start innovating and coming out with new solutions, so higher clock speeds are a good thing.

--bdj