Bernard Peek <b...@shrdlu.com> writes: >In message <EP2dnT5-eLW8vnvXnZ2dnUVZ_jpi4...@supernews.com>, PV ><pv+use...@pobox.com> writes >>Bernard Peek <b...@shrdlu.com> writes: >>>What we need to do next is to run processors at faster clock-speeds,
>>Says who? *
>Mostly AMD, who are currently behind the curve. Of course increasing >clock speeds is only one of the requirements.
What makes you think AMD is interested in increasing clock speeds? Istanbul has 6 cores, mangy-cours has 12.
Heat is the enemy and faster clocks lead directly to more heat dissipation.
Sure innovative cooling techniques can be developed, but ask any datacenter; power and cooling are the two factors that any data center will attempt to reduce.
Mike Ash <m...@mikeash.com> writes: >It's interesting how people are always talking about how difficult >multi-threaded programming is (and justifiably so) but completely gloss >over all the difficulties involved in making new and better chips.
For most people, the difficulty of making new and better chips is simply not relevant to them. The number of people at Intel, AMD and a few other companies who are designing new microprocessors is counted in the hundreds, but the number of programmers working on programs that could benefit from parallelism (even if they currently do not) is in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
Zoltan Somogyi <z...@cs.mu.OZ.AU> http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~zs/ Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Univ. of Melbourne
On 2009-10-27, Zoltan Somogyi <z...@students.cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> For most people, the difficulty of making new and better chips is > simply not relevant to them. The number of people at Intel, AMD and > a few other companies who are designing new microprocessors is > counted in the hundreds, but the number of programmers working on > programs that could benefit from parallelism (even if they currently > do not) is in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
Yes, that's a decent argument for trying to keep processors as fast on a single core as humanly possible for as long as possible. A 50% direct speed boost may cost a few hundred people a few tens of thousands of hours of design effort each. Total cost: 10 million person-hours.
Designing all programs to use a second CPU core to achieve the same average 50% speed boost (not all problems parallelize well) could easily cost a few hundred thousand programmers a few hundred hours each in extra design and debugging time. Total cost: 100 million person-hours.
Of course by this point second cores are pretty close to "free", and they're not going to go away. Quad-core CPUs are becoming common in end-user systems, massively parallel video processing has been common for years, and there are massively multicore general-purpose CPUs on the way.
> Brains ARE much faster than computers. Glance at a scene, tell me what's > in it. You can do this way faster than any computer.
Computers and brains are very very DIFFERENT. Your example above does not establish that brains are faster, it just establishes that there exists jobs which the brain can perform faster. But there exists plenty of jobs that a computer can do faster too, so this line of reasoning brings you nowhere.
Glance at an array of a million integers, output the 13th smallest. Not even a one-second-job for a modern computer, whereas your brain will spend days performing the same job.
Eivind <eivindor...@gmail.com> wrote: > Mike Ash skreiv:
> > Brains ARE much faster than computers. Glance at a scene, tell me what's > > in it. You can do this way faster than any computer.
> Computers and brains are very very DIFFERENT. Your example above does > not establish that brains are faster, it just establishes that there > exists jobs which the brain can perform faster. But there exists plenty > of jobs that a computer can do faster too, so this line of reasoning > brings you nowhere.
> Glance at an array of a million integers, output the 13th smallest. Not > even a one-second-job for a modern computer, whereas your brain will > spend days performing the same job.
I'd be interested in any computer program which can even get this job right, let alone fast, given that it includes "glance at".
The basics of the brain are understood well enough that the "faster than computers" statement can be made. Each neuron is VERY roughly equivalent to a 1MFLOPS CPU. There are 50-100 billion neurons. Multiply the two, and there you go.
Of course the equivalence is extremely rough. But the difference in power is so enormous right now that we can fairly safely say that the reason a computer can perform things like multiplication so much faster than a brain is because of the software.
-- Mike Ash Radio Free Earth Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon
On Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:20:31 -0400, Mike Ash wrote: > In article <7kqa1iF3b60g...@mid.individual.net>, > Eivind <eivindor...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Mike Ash skreiv:
>> > Brains ARE much faster than computers. Glance at a scene, tell me >> > what's in it. You can do this way faster than any computer.
>> Computers and brains are very very DIFFERENT. Your example above does >> not establish that brains are faster, it just establishes that there >> exists jobs which the brain can perform faster. But there exists plenty >> of jobs that a computer can do faster too, so this line of reasoning >> brings you nowhere.
>> Glance at an array of a million integers, output the 13th smallest. Not >> even a one-second-job for a modern computer, whereas your brain will >> spend days performing the same job.
> I'd be interested in any computer program which can even get this job > right, let alone fast, given that it includes "glance at".
I think that's just a non-obvious choice of words, but I think you get the point the OP is making.
I'm not sure, but I think it's a story about a _much_ faster vision system.
-- ======================================================================= = David --- If you use Microsoft products, you will, inevitably, get = Mitchell --- viruses, so please don't add me to your address book. =======================================================================
On Oct 27, 3:19 am, Zoltan Somogyi <z...@students.cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> Mike Ash <m...@mikeash.com> writes: > >It's interesting how people are always talking about how difficult > >multi-threaded programming is (and justifiably so) but completely gloss > >over all the difficulties involved in making new and better chips.
> For most people, the difficulty of making new and better chips is simply not > relevant to them. The number of people at Intel, AMD and a few other companies > who are designing new microprocessors is counted in the hundreds, but > the number of programmers working on programs that could benefit from > parallelism (even if they currently do not) is in the hundreds of thousands, > if not millions.
You under estimate the economic cost of making new and better chips. Those few thousand designers are just the end of a very long engineering chain to get better chips. Newer and better chips with higher transistor density come on new processes with smaller feature size. I don't have any idea how many folks it takes to create the technology and process for a new feature size process but it may be in the millions. The whole supply chain and machinery serving it retools for a new process size.
Then a few thousand designers come along and design to create silicon products on that new process.
>> >> or might be bound by limits in theoretical computing (especially if P >> >> != NP, as many experts believe). Also, many intellectual tools whose >> >> discovery required genius - statistics and experimental design, >> >> axiomatic approaches, appeals to symmetry - are now routinely taught >> >> to mortals below genius grade, so (in relative terms) de-skilling >> >> scientific discovery. Silicon or carbon based super-geniuses will >> >> certainly extend the region lit by light of our intelligence, but >> >> until that happens, I don't think we will know whether what is >> >> revealed is a garden or a desert.
>> >It's worth reflecting that there are a large number of problems on >> >which even merely human level intelligences could probably make vastly >> >more progress than human civilization currently does... because >> >civilization presently allocates relatively few resources to these >> >projects due to the high cost of humans. A PhD-level researcher, with >> >overhead, benefits, costs... what? $150K/year? Probably more.
>> >What if a machine with that intellectual capability were a $1000 >> >off-the-shelf item, and you could rack them up in data centers?
>> I kind of suspect they'd be more concerned with their problems than >> ours.
>I was assuming that they'd be engineered not to be; that they'd be >intelligent, but without much in the way of personality or outside >interests.
>But even if they weren't designed this way (maybe you just can't design >human-level intelligences like that, or maybe we'd decide it would be >immoral), and they were granted legal equality (so you couldn't just use >them as slave labor), they'd probably still be a lot cheaper to hire >than human PhDs presently are, as a simple matter of supply and demand.
Hire? They are going to be the ones with all the money.
> >> >> or might be bound by limits in theoretical computing (especially if P > >> >> != NP, as many experts believe). Also, many intellectual tools whose > >> >> discovery required genius - statistics and experimental design, > >> >> axiomatic approaches, appeals to symmetry - are now routinely taught > >> >> to mortals below genius grade, so (in relative terms) de-skilling > >> >> scientific discovery. Silicon or carbon based super-geniuses will > >> >> certainly extend the region lit by light of our intelligence, but > >> >> until that happens, I don't think we will know whether what is > >> >> revealed is a garden or a desert.
> >> >It's worth reflecting that there are a large number of problems on > >> >which even merely human level intelligences could probably make vastly > >> >more progress than human civilization currently does... because > >> >civilization presently allocates relatively few resources to these > >> >projects due to the high cost of humans. A PhD-level researcher, with > >> >overhead, benefits, costs... what? $150K/year? Probably more.
> >> >What if a machine with that intellectual capability were a $1000 > >> >off-the-shelf item, and you could rack them up in data centers?
> >> I kind of suspect they'd be more concerned with their problems than > >> ours.
> >I was assuming that they'd be engineered not to be; that they'd be > >intelligent, but without much in the way of personality or outside > >interests.
> >But even if they weren't designed this way (maybe you just can't design > >human-level intelligences like that, or maybe we'd decide it would be > >immoral), and they were granted legal equality (so you couldn't just use > >them as slave labor), they'd probably still be a lot cheaper to hire > >than human PhDs presently are, as a simple matter of supply and demand.
> Hire? They are going to be the ones with all the money.
Eventually. Hopefully they won't be libertarians, and we'll be able to convince them to support a strong welfare system for us disadvantaged meat people.
-- "The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and over-exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll." -- John Maynard Keynes
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