The Future of Computing Performance: Game over or next level?

[Johnny87au]

we will move from silicon to something else once that happens, i think that its past 15nm we begin to reach the limits of silicon.

Technology cant go on forever,well it can just gonna be hard to replace everything which we've been using for the last decade meaning there gonna have to figure out something new... Gonna come to a hault eventually..

[VulgarHandle]

Technology cant go on forever,well it can just gonna be hard to replace everything which we've been using for the last decade meaning there gonna have to figure out something new... Gonna come to a hault eventually..

technology has always had to work with what's available, and what's available has always changed due to technology

[Johnny87au]

technology has always had to work with what's available, and what's available has always changed due to technology

True that, Whats left to work with is becoming very limited, Mayb they might make transistors out of uranium ? ... only joshing

[nn_step]

Report fails in so many respects that it isn't funny.

1) The majority of code is serial because there is nothing to gain by going parallel. [How many threads does your favorite calculator program need?]
2) The applications where parallel code is of great benefit, has already gone multi-threaded [WCG anyone?]
3) 90% of the consumer market's demand for computing power, has reached a plain of sufficient processing power
4) the rest who actually have an ever growing need for processing power, will accept any level of power as long as more processing power is generated than the amount of energy consumed.

[Calmatory]

I wish the software industry would drive the hardware industry instead.
Wouldnt it be nice if we had software capable of being executed in 24 threads but not yet the processor to do it?
Then we could just be counting the weeks till a 24 thread processor came out to provide all that power.
I like that world more than 'we have a 24 thread processor but we need to make each core as fast as possible so we still run those 1 threaded codes faster'

Sigh.

Name 3 time critical programs which aren't properly multi threaded! There aren't any.

There is no NEED to go faster. Why would there be? The trend is to go smaller and more efficient. Desktop shipments will go down as usual and netbook shipments will go up. We're yet to find the optimal solution; something between a smartphone and a tablet. A personal device capable of everything. Though I believe that we're with ~10-14" netbooks/notebooks and smartphones for a long while. I don't see tablets being "the" future really.

As AMD has been preaching heterogenous computing will be the future. More and more of integration and cheaper parts benefit everyone.

The trend of desktop machines will soon be dead for great majority of Internet and computer users No more huge powerhouse gaming rigs and easy parts swapping and overclocking.

[god_43]

Sigh.

Name 3 time critical programs which aren't properly multi threaded! There aren't any.

There is no NEED to go faster. Why would there be? The trend is to go smaller and more efficient. Desktop shipments will go down as usual and netbook shipments will go up. We're yet to find the optimal solution; something between a smartphone and a tablet. A personal device capable of everything. Though I believe that we're with ~10-14" netbooks/notebooks and smartphones for a long while. I don't see tablets being "the" future really.

As AMD has been preaching heterogenous computing will be the future. More and more of integration and cheaper parts benefit everyone.

The trend of desktop machines will soon be dead for great majority of Internet and computer users No more huge powerhouse gaming rigs and easy parts swapping and overclocking.

i dont like your version of the future...i need my desktop rigs!

[iboomalot]

I use a laptop at work but not at home.

I want to be wrapped up in the graphics that a large monitor gives me
I want to have high frame rates and low ghosting
I want fast one click photoshop experience
I want to be able to decode/rip 3 DVDs at once and burn 2-3 at one time

I want the time savings and speed a desktop gives.

I need a computer but I want a fast one

A wise old man once said "I can always make more money, but I can't make more time. So Money wasted can be made back but my wasted time is gone forever"

[AffenJack]

You know from time to time we get this kind of article. I have great faith in human ingenuity and I am certain that we will not hit a wall. This is not something new.

As ever, new discoveries will be made, new manufacturing processes will be invented. And don't forget as was mentioned above that there is a huge performance reservoir than can be tapped simply by writing better, a little more optimized software. Hardware has made such a rapid progress that there wasn't any incentive to optimize software.

Time will tell but I doubt we'll hit a technological wall for the foreseeable future.

Of Course we will hit a wall, hitting a wall is totally normal and happens every time with newer technology. People in the early 20th century also believed engines will get better, cars/planes faster etc. in the future you'll reach every place in a few minutes and for some time technology improved very fast. But then suddenly they hit a wall from where on the technology just improves slowly. The same will happen with chip technology in maybe 10/20 years. But other technologys will start to grow fast, maybe something like modification of humans with nanorobots etc or even something we can't imagine now.

[Chaserjzx100]

The trend of desktop machines will soon be dead for great majority of Internet and computer users No more huge powerhouse gaming rigs and easy parts swapping and overclocking.

this! i can already see this happening today and the next few years.. all devices will be just like thinclients....

[445533]

this! i can already see this happening today and the next few years.. all devices will be just like thinclients....

There's a place for thinclients, but I doubt it will be the norm. Internet connections can be flaky and connecting to a cloud service can be madness in those situations.

Not only that, but many of these "cloud" services and media storage sites are shutting down as they are replaced with other things for various reasons, financial problems, popularity and etc. The "cloud" is in chaos right now and isn't dependable for storage.

I foresee a hybrid approach. Local storage and online interaction with services. If it can be done online, and done well, it will be.

[zalbard]

this! i can already see this happening today and the next few years.. all devices will be just like thinclients....

Poor Intel, AMD, Nvidia with their desktop CPU / GPU plans for up to 2020, then.

[Sn0wm@n]

While I cannot say I have ever heard of the organization responsible for publishing the report, I can say with certainty that many of the committee members involved are what you'd considered experts in the field. Both sides, academia (William Dally & Mark Hill are those I'm familiar with) and industry (Intel/AMD/Nvidia/Google/etc.), are represented in the group.

Despite it appearing all doom and gloom to you, the issues at hand have been known for quite some time. The report is just summarizing them and recommending what could probably be defined as a national course of action, something targeted at policy makers. Mainly it comes down to advocating a better coordinated paradigm shift to (thread) parallelism, ideally through better education/research into algorithms, hardware and (power-)efficiency at all levels. Support is mentioned for specialized/heterogeneous computing resources as well.

Like some of the others have stated, nothing new here really.

but they keep focusing on todays tech ... and even in todays tech .. isnt the reccord for smallest transistor today about .8nm .. yes .8 ... ive read about that somewhere ... so why is it all doom and gloom when its obvious the industry is trying to find new ways to shrink...and lets not even discount optical computing .. or even room temperature quantum computing ...


so why all the doom and gloom even if its people from the industry who had some sort of a say in this document ...

[sin0822]

Now what YBMO and YBCO that show signs of superconductivity above 0k, I am guessing we will have to mix that conductor, dope it with some semi-conductor and get going then. Or do somthing with some nice material, you need a material scientist to tell you more, thats about all I learned about YBMO ceramics.

[god_43]

sorry double post, please delete.

you can delete the post yourself, if you click edit. either you see the option there, or you have to click advanced.

[andos]

Graphene??

lolz

[Sn0wm@n]

technology has always had to work with what's available, and what's available has always changed due to technology

bingo .. and this is why i never understand those doom and gloom news ...

[sin0822]

grapheme LOL yea right. So Bucky Balls next??? Balls of carbon atoms.

[Calmatory]

There's a place for thinclients, but I doubt it will be the norm. Internet connections can be flaky and connecting to a cloud service can be madness in those situations.

Not only that, but many of these "cloud" services and media storage sites are shutting down as they are replaced with other things for various reasons, financial problems, popularity and etc. The "cloud" is in chaos right now and isn't dependable for storage.

I foresee a hybrid approach. Local storage and online interaction with services. If it can be done online, and done well, it will be.

The cloud hasn't even taken off yet. At some point you do not have web browsers any more. You do not have most of your programs installed on your system; rather as a web service. Your desktop will directly bring you to the web, rather than the browser. Actually most of the OS functionality can be from web too. This isn't happening today, tomorrow, next year.. But maybe in 10 years, ChromeOS is an early prototype of this.

[sin0822]

I doubt that will take off, as then what happens if your cloud goes down, reliability issues become HUGE, as does COST. never going to work, cloud right.

[Chaserjzx100]

Poor Intel, AMD, Nvidia with their desktop CPU / GPU plans for up to 2020, then.

i don't think any of them should worry, well nvidia should... discrete video cards are going the way of the dinosaurs in the next few years..

microsoft is going on a semi-cloud based in 8, chrome is already a cloud os made in mind, apple is launching appstore on there mac's. everything is on the net including your log in name sigh..

[Calmatory]

I doubt that will take off, as then what happens if your cloud goes down, reliability issues become HUGE, as does COST. never going to work, cloud right.

Clouds won't go down. How many times has Google been down during the past 10 years? As we now get electricity from the wall, we soon get data and information from the cloud. I'm personally completely against this kind of progress, but there's no other option than to accept it without giving up privacy. Hopefully SSL will become more and more popular.

[Sn0wm@n]

the cloud sucks ...


LOL why do these sort of threads always have to go of terrain and take the most absurd direction ...

[randomizer]

Unfortunately we have this minor inconvenience called backwards compatibility to deal with that wasn't so much of an issue when we started using modern transistors because computers had not pervaded nearly as much as they have today. That said, more performance will keep being demanded and we're going to have to move on eventually. Power consumption is always going to be one of the primary reasons for a technological shift. It's why we're not still using vacuum tubes.

[Cold Fussion]

Now what YBMO and YBCO that show signs of superconductivity above 0k, I am guessing we will have to mix that conductor, dope it with some semi-conductor and get going then. Or do somthing with some nice material, you need a material scientist to tell you more, thats about all I learned about YBMO ceramics.

You appear to be somewhat confused, all superconductivity happens above 0k, as 0k is unreachable. YBCO has superconductivity at 90k.

[Aberration]

molded diamond transistors grown in vaccum FTW!

Diamond doesn't conduct. I think the lattice structure leaves no holes for electrons to pass, although it make have it's uses in other places.

Graphene is good, but forms in single atom layers, and so poses other problems.

We just need an entirely new approach, like vacuum tubes to transistors provided.