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GCC and static analysisGCC and static analysisPosted Apr 29, 2012 18:11 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: GCC and static analysis by khim Parent article: GCC and static analysis
Well, there are asynchronous chips that can work without clocking entirely.
They are easy to create for low 'frequencies', but it becomes harder and harder to design them as you increase their complexity. However they are not limited by the lightspeed.
We still have a lot of way to go. Probably, we'll reach at least 20-30GHz with carbon-based transistors.
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GCC and static analysis Posted Apr 29, 2012 18:21 UTC (Sun) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
A light-nanosecond is roughly 30cm (or roughly a foot, if you'd like). So at 1Ghz, light in a vacuum can reach 30cm per tick. Electrical signals in copper travel at around (1/3)c can reach 10cm.
(I find it very funny that we can use such nice numbers, given that both the meter and second were defined long before c was known.)
So at 20Ghz, this is cut to 5mm. In other words, your die can have a diameter of at most 5mm, no matter what crazy architecture you can imagine, if you want the processor to function at 20Ghz. So in a space of (5mm)^2, you're sending 20 000 000 000 signals per second, which need to be much stronger than background noise.
This does not sound possible to me.
GCC and static analysis Posted Apr 29, 2012 18:28 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>A light-nanosecond is roughly 30cm (or roughly a foot, if you'd like). So at 1Ghz, light in a vacuum can reach 30cm per tick. Electrical signals in copper travel at around (1/3)c can reach 10cm.
Yep, I have one nano-lightsecond length of wire in a frame on a wall at home (it is a gift from a friend who got it from Admiral Grace Hopper herself).
>So at 20Ghz, this is cut to 5mm. In other words, your die can have a diameter of at most 5mm, no matter what crazy architecture you can imagine
>So in a space of (5mm)^2, you're sending 20 000 000 000 signals per second, which need to be much stronger than background noise.
GCC and static analysis Posted Apr 30, 2012 15:10 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Why? Async chips do not depend (strongly) on the speed of light. Async has huge PR value (you can claim you chip is working on 100GHz or even 1THz if you are lucky). It does not change anything WRT to actual speed of computation. One part of an async chip can be doing completely unrelated tasks. It's the same with synchronous schemes as well. Why do you think Prescott had over 30 stages in pipeline? Why do you think Itanic has L1, L2 and L3 caches - all on the same chip with the same semiconductor process technology? Of course, in the end you'll hit the lightspeed wall, but it's a long way off. In the end the nominal number on the CPU envelope is just a number. Sure, you can create totally-async 1THz chip which will need "about 1000 tics" to add two numbers together, but it'll be slower then Core i7 so what's the point? Lightspeed barrier it as real for async as it's for traditional CPU. Note that lightspeed barrier only limits latency (of single-threaded program in this particular case), it does not affect throughput at all. In fact a way to create tremendous throughput is well known: just use more of the same things! So? Modern network routers work at about the same speed and die size. They don't execute sequential program, that's totally different kettle of fish. For them streaming async design makes perfect sense. For GPUs it can be applied, too. For CPUs? Not so much. Netburst tried to do that. It failed. I doubt anyone will actually try to do it again.
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