February 6, 2008: Two Billion Transistors

[dar512]

There are a number of "laws" to go along with Moore's law. Programmers and techies of all sorts have a fondness for them.

Here are a few:

Ellison's Law: The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

Hanlon's Law: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Hoare's Law: Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out.

Occam's Razor: The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.

Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage

[Flint]

But what is that sauce that goes on it? That's where the magic is.

[torgut9]

Is this fake-proof picture??? Over 2 billion transistors..??!!
*starts to count every single of them*

(wish me luck)

[Gravdigr]

Originally Posted by nil_orally

Is it just me that sees a cubist representation of a robotic goatse in this image?

Goatse. Tubgirl. Two girls one cup. Two girls one finger. There, we never have to hear about any of them EVER AGAIN!!!!

[Shawnee123]

I see this:

[deadbeater]

In ten years the Tukwilla will be part of a 16-core CPU/motherboard that will fit about the size of that current chip. The board will be used to play iTunes.

[monster]

In 20 years, the tukwila will be worn as jewelry in a junior high near you.

[monster]

Originally Posted by dar512

There are a number of "laws" to go along with Moore's law. Programmers and techies of all sorts have a fondness for them.

Here are a few:

Ellison's Law: The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

Hanlon's Law: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Hoare's Law: Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out.

Occam's Razor: The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.

Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage

You missed Murphy

[tw]

Originally Posted by tw

Meanwhile, the next generation of processing is multicore. But as Sony's Playstation Three demonstrates, we have a serious problem making software that can utilize multicore processors. Where would be a good place to invest? Who can solve this software problem now that Intel has solved the Moore Law challenge using multicore processors?

Multiprocessing, multicore processors, parallel processing, and the associated software appears to be a next bottleneck for the computer industry.

From the NY Times of 30 April 2008:

Race Is on to Advance Software for Chips
Stanford University and six computer and chip makers plan to announce Friday the creation of the Pervasive Parallelism Lab. Besides Stanford, the backers are Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia, I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Intel.

Last month, Intel and Microsoft announced they were jointly financing new labs at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to tackle the same problem.

All three efforts are in response to a growing awareness that the software industry is not ready for the coming availability of microprocessors with 8 or 16 or more cores, or processing units, on a single chip. Computer and chip makers are concerned that if software cannot use the new hardware efficiently, customers will have little reason to upgrade.

[dar512]

I think the answer will be computer languages (and to a certain extent operating systems) that help the programmer facilitate multi-processing.

Coding for multiprocessing can be incredibly easy - if none of the tasks depend on the other or share resources. But that's not what people are going to want. Most people can't multitask past a few tasks. They want the one or two tasks they're working on to go faster.

In order to take advantage of multiple cpus in that scenario, a lot of interdependence and sharing of resources has to happen. This is typically pretty klunky to do in current languages. I suspect the next big thing in computer languages will be the one that sorts this stuff out.

[Imigo Jones]

Originally Posted by linknoid

I might also guess (all of this is guesswork) based on the layout that the two cores on the right are more closely tied, as are the two cores on the left, and for the right side and left side to communicate it has to go through the middle.

Link, the middle is called the corepus calculosa.



:p

[tw]

Originally Posted by Imigo Jones

Link, the middle is called the corepus calculosa.

Will you want a left handed or right handed computer?

[Imigo Jones]

Originally Posted by tw

Will you want a left handed or right handed computer?

Left-handed, please, tw. All hemispheric things being equal, and for what it's worth, the cor(e)pus cal(cu)losum is generally a bit more substantial in left-handers.



"Okay, now stretch. . . . That's is. A little more. . . . Str-r-r-e-t-ch. . . . Okay, hold. Good, . . . a-n-d release." Sproing!

[Torrere]

All that, and they named it after an airport town...

[Agent-G]

these chips must be fun to build......