John Hearns wrote: > BTW, re the discussion on processor frequency scaling, > what finally did happen to Emitter Coupled Logic and gallium arsenide?
I followed the exponential "intel killer" for quite some time, although it seemed obvious to me from the first slides it was going to be a failure. Sky high clock rates, tiny caches, and a poor memory buss seemed to be destined for failure. If gallium arsenide or some other material gave us 10x the clock rate per watt, but 1/2 the transistors would it really matter? Seemed like even intel is begrudgingly admitting it's the memory bus, and finally the nehalem is blessed with dramatically more bandwidth. Seems like increasingly cores are turning latency limited workloads (for the parallel jobs of course) into bandwidth limited ones. Without a memory bus that allows for 10x the bandwidth it doesn't really seem like 10x the clock rate would be of particular use. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
