What is the Future of CPU's?

[Game Over]

Just curious what you guys think the future of CPU's are for the next 10 years or so. I remember using a floppy disc as a drive, then Hard Drives and now computer evolution is moving to SDD, Major jumps in technology.

But what about the CPU? There has been talk in the past about Quantum physics CPU's or CPU's that are powered by living cells etc. But thats still something out there like the promised flying car.

I can see the CPU gradualy getting lower nm, higher power and greater numbers of cores.

So how many cores can they go in a CPU. 20 - 40 - Hundreds, Will the cpu itself have to end up being the size of a playing card, Will they maybe hit a wall at lets say 32 cores and start putting out Mother boards with 2,3 or 4 slots for CPU's? A personal gaming rig with 4 processors each with 32 cores running at 12GHz?

Is this basically where it goes or is there some new tech coming that will replace it?

You guys know much more about the subject than I, Just curious what your thoughts are or what you have heard or maybe news you have seen on the subject.

 

[dugdiamond]

i think that there will have to be a drastic change...

a new compound/alloy will have to be created to house the future architectures that make up a processor.

at the moment, electric pathways (etched on the silicon) have met their ultimate miniature sizes. even though we are fitting more processors on a single dye (chip), the electrical charge/pulses/info per data calculation creates too much heat (even at lower volts).

a remedy for this, would have to be something smaller (on a molecular level). this new tech would have to stay static on a medium, so that rules out living cells - as they move, grow and die.

IMHO - it is the PCB, that brings all parts of the external technologies (CPU, GPU, audio, storage, etc...), that should be focused on. miniaturise those, and speeds will increase expotentially.

 

[Garol]

There are AMD Opteron boards already that support 4 CPU's, can be used with 12 core Opterons.

About the cpu's. Its just the consumer product line that goes higher. The technology has already made big improvements. Intel made 80 core cpu some years ago etc.

They just gotta keep on line with the consumers. They cant release something people cant afford - it will cause themselves to bankrupt.

So the conclusion is, the CPU's are actually revolutionary already. Just not available to us, end users.

 

[marsey99]

the next step seems to be nano strings but that's a while off yet, as said its going to be more of the same for a while, more cores and a little bit higher mhz.

imo I think the next big jump will be system RAM, it will go and be replaced by super fast pci e fed ssd drives that are RAM/c drive in one. cpu already have imc and pci e on dye so combining the 2 can't be that far off, can it?

 

[kilobravo]

Last thing i read from a sciense mag,was last year,talking about holografic computing and storage,on experimental stage,its like 1000x faster,than possible with silicon chips.

 

[marick626]

I believe IBM (or a university) where able to create a real quantum cpu, it couldn't do much but it proved like it was possible. The difference between quantum cpus and flying cars, is that the later would be restricted with federal regulations requiring people to have pilots licenses etc. The quantum cpu has no such limitation. However, both things are limited by the current technology. We are just not there yet. Perhaps if governments put less money on creating weapons and spend more money on education we would be there by now.

 

[Game Over]

One thing is for sure, in ten years, people will be looking back at our current high end rigs as a joke. I remember buying a brand new PC for College back in 1998, spent like $2500 usd on a top of the line SONY VAIO desk top, had a whopping 4gb hard drive. Had my kick butt dial up net too, could download a single song off the net in just over 20 minutes or so.

But ya, some of the stuff you guys are mentioning sound very interesting, Thought I heard something about a CPU based on nano fiber optics and would generate almost no heat.

Im going to go do some research and see whats new on the subject

 

[Rastalovich]

It doesn't suprise me that someone like IBM/ti can make the fastest computing setup in the world, for doing their mostly in-house and business for their close partners.

On a public front, we're latched to Intel/AMD's want from extracting the best wedge of cash from the masses.

In this case, we're talking smaller steps forward. Not too big a step, but enough to make you ponder that your i5 is going to be a "decent" purchase over your "ageing" 775. For what you do it never is, but the artificial bench figures are there.

Hardware for the public has moved so much as to have people considering skipping generations of sockets cos it doesn't make absolute sense to upgrade. Something akin to having a pentium ii and jumping to 775 - which you'd never have considered before - you would have wanted the pentium iii in the interim.

Software on the other hand doesn't move as fast. The majority is still 32 bit orientated, and the use of cores is still a novelty.

 

[sdms1010]

There is a lot of cutting edge tech. out there but it will not be useable as a commercial product yet and maybe not for a long time to come. They could possibly bang out some uber expensive high maintance units for the people with more money than sense but that is only a small scale buisiness and the big bucks are in large scale and reliable products because once sold they don't want them back.

The question might be how long will they go on makeing modeuler computers or will people like intel just offer integrated units (motherbored/cpu/mem/graphics)which they could make smaller to fit into other products like TVs.

As long as we keep buying the latest new bit for our super comps they will probably keep on going but once they think they can make more money going down another line, then it could be the end of the line for the home builders and we will have to take what they give us.

 

[bertdasquirt]

If you are a regular reader of Custom pc there is an article in there about cpus/ chips/ dies etc. Mainly about how they are slowly finding the limits to useing silicone. According to this article they have tested many other ways but they do not have the same i/o success rate as silicone, BUT are sooo ,much faster and smaller! i mean 10 times as fast and way smaller... also i believe there has been some research into creating bridges using light instead of copper wire...

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

Would there be equivilant speed between a 2ghz cpu running the same load as a 4ghz cpu if you halved it's size but to compensate for the influence of quantumn mechanics screwing with signals you also halved the voltage?

if so then could you in theory create a 20mhz processor the size of a pin head with equivilant power to say a 5ghz 990x due to the distance for signals to travel being so much shorter?

 

[marsey99]

in theory yea mate but as said we are already fast approaching the limits of the current tech that the gains would be less. its an tactic that amd used a few years back with the amd64 chips and how their 2ghz cpu could run rings around intels 3ghz+ cpu. amd made the signal travel a much shorter distance so it was weeks faster clock per clock, its also something Intel copied a lot from when they changed to the core 2 cpu.

I was reading something after this thread and quantum cpu are there now but prohibitively expensive. also due to their ability to render both 1s and 0s at the same time software would need to be rewritten otherwise it can't run. not that I fully understood what I was reading but the pictures look nice xD

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

I'm sure some code monkey can whip up a software conversion app and make a quick fortune