One for the tech-heads

[andrewducker]

This is a video of a presentation by the lead architect on the Pentium 6 on chip design and the future of CPUs. If you have any interest in the future of silicon, it's well worth a watch.

It's also an hour and a half long, but watch the first ten minutes. I did, and now I'm hooked. It's a presentation made _after_ he left, so he has some fairly scathing things to say about politics in big companies.

(The upshot so far is - we cannot carry on in the direction we are going, heat problems are just too much, complexity problems are just too much and we are running out of new big ideas to improve performance. We are, instead, relying on multiple little improvements, each of which adds a layer of complexity and means that the chips are much harder to debug).

Oh - and it's an ASX file, so Windows Media Player only. Well worth grabbing a machine with that on it though.

Comments

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's a good piece. Also see the writeup on dual core processors on Anandtech.

[andrewducker]

Cheers for that. Multi-processor stuff is interesting, and sounds like the future to me - unless fully 3D chips become feasible (heat dissipation obviously being a massive problem there) massively multi-processor chips seem the most likely alternative.

Imagine 32 _slow_ chips, running a multi-threaded system - sure it's not so handy if you're mostly running a monolithic program, but if you separate out your program into lots of cooperating processes then you get to turn on processors when you need them and save power when you don't.