Manufacturers of commodity processors are looking to increase throughput by many means other than increasing clock speeds. As chips get cheaper and faster, Linux programmers must change the way they think.
Smaller dies, larger caches, multiple cores, and even quantum mechanics promise to turbocharge tomorrow’s processors
Manufacturers of commodity processors are looking to increase throughput by many means other than increasing clock speeds. As chips get cheaper and faster, Linux programmers must change the way they think.
Joab Jackson
Expect no miracles from tomorrow’s computers. In many ways, computers of the near future, say, the next five years, will be very similar to what you have sitting on your desk right now. Teleportation won’t be a feature, nor will you be able to record, transmit, and play holographic images. In fact, the processors inside may not even be that much faster.
But make no mistake, great changes are afoot. It’s as if, after years of sudden spurts of speed gains, silicon-based commodity processors are now maturing, being designed with a newfound empathy for users. Tomorrow’s computing workhorses should better fit users’ needs, whether the need is playing a movie on a laptop or serving terabytes of interactive web pages to millions of web surfers.
Once, commodity processors gunned to be the fastest chip. Now, chips are competing to be the best chip for the job.
Why the sea change? Partially, it’s due to the limits of the technology. For one, AMD and Intel are quickly coming up against the physical limits of how fast they can make their processors….
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