Re: Intel publishes Larrabee paper

On Mar 2, 3:20 am, n...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Liquid cooling is a crazy idea for most environments - it removes one
problem and adds several others.  Yes, it has its uses, but there is
little option (in general) but to reduce the power requirement.

That doesn't mean that stacking CPUs and memory isn't a good idea.
You can actually do much better than a few thousand pins, if the two
components are stacked as part of the manufacturing process.

One could have a stack of two chips, and reduce the power requirement
a little.

If we have a stack of chips that is, say, a cubic inch in size, and we
want a clock rate the same as non-stacked chips can achieve, then,
yes, one has to go with liquid cooling - as recently achieved by IBM -
as an expensive measure for an "ultimate performance" device.

I don't see anything wrong with that, as it ought to be possible for
companies requiring supercomputing power to be able to spend extra
money to get something better than X consumer PC's in parallel (but
with somewhat tighter coupling for big extra bucks).

Of course, for exotic chip materials to become competitive with
silicon without the giant x86 production runs probably *is* a fantasy.

But why do we desperately need more powerful computers?

I'd like to upload my mind and live forever, but aside from such a
practical goal, if the only reason we "need" more powerful computers
is so that Microsoft can release an operating system even *more*
bloated and inefficient than Vista, so that we can *think* we need
more powerful computers, there doesn't seem to be a point.

The original 5-volt 66 MHz Pentium, except for the floating-point
division bug, was already more powerful than a 360/195.

Of course, there are many interesting scientific problems that could
indeed accept all the computing power we could throw at them. Not
everyone uses their computers just for surfing the web, word
processing, sending E-mail, and playing video games. But getting the
mass market to subsidize more powerful chips whose power is only ever
really used by people who need supercomputers... sounds very
backwards.

And it also has a tendency to bite you when one of Kim Jong Il's spies
buys a Playstation 3 or a 4870 video card and smuggles it by submarine
into North Korea... giving him all he needs to design their first
hydrogen bomb. Or something like that.

It's actually a good thing that security concerns aren't being allowed
to halt the computer revolution, of course, but other than Microsoft
and Intel making lots of money selling us new stuff more often, it's
unclear to me what all this is in aid of.

Either IBM can decide to manufacture x86 chips *too*, instead of z/
Architecture and PowerPC, so that it can horn in on the gravy train,
OR it had better figure out what people really _need_ massive
increments of computer power for, so that as it struggles to keep up
in technology, it will actually _have_ customers who have something
that they really want to DO with it besides run Microsoft's latest
abomination (which doesn't run on PowerPC or z/Architecture).

Of course, at least IBM *has* customers - customers whose needs it
does know how to meet better than Intel (and HP) does yet with Itanium
boxes. Cray and Sun and a bunch of other guys are in even *deeper*
trouble. But IBM's turn will come.

Of course, after the OS/2 debacle, it may have decided that going down
with the buggy whip business is the only available option.

John Savard
.

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