What is the story on the problem with processors?

I meant to ask this question a while ago... When i was watching the keynote developers conference Jobs stated that the processor industry had hit a wall in terms of speed, and that they having problems because of what exactly???

It's something like 90 nanometre thingys can only produce so much power at the moment without exploding. I can't remember. But 90 nanometres are in it somewhere. I'm sure somebody else can give a much better explanation than that

The wall he was referring to, is related to the heat generated by the processors.

Because an Intel processor, say the pentium 4, has to run a lot faster than a powerpc processor to calculate the same amount of data, they also all run a lot hotter.

The are now running so fast, that predictions say it won't be long until the cooling systems needed to enable them to run will become to costly to be practible.

Powerpc's on the other hand crunch a similar amount of data at lower speeds (I think because they compute a larger amount of data every clock-cycle)...

So Jobs is basically saying: "our way is better..".

Also Pentium and AMD are dropping their chips now in order to try out a "dual processor" chipset, hmm, sounds familiar doesnt it?

So If that is such a problem why doesn't Apple just keep makeing there macs with more and more processors running in parrallel? 2,4,8,16,32,64 and so on?

citystar2k said:

Also Pentium and AMD are dropping their chips now in order to try out a "dual processor" chipset, hmm, sounds familiar doesnt it?

Click to expand...

i think it's actually a "dual core" processor that they're looking at, which is different from actually having "dual processors" (2 processors). so it would actually be a completely different kind of chip, not just 2 pentiums or 2 AMD's together

Oh, I thought that is kind of the idea of "hyper threading" technology, am i right, if not, then what is this so called "hyper threading"?

Oh, I thought that is kind of the idea of "hyper threading" technology, am i right, if not, then what is this so called "hyper threading"?

Click to expand...

Please, correct me if I am wrong.
Hyperthreading is the ability to make it seem as though there are 2 physical processors when there are not.
A dual core processor is a single processor that actually has multiple physical cores inside.

So If that is such a problem why doesn't Apple just keep makeing there macs with more and more processors running in parrallel? 2,4,8,16,32,64 and so on?

Click to expand...

You dont get full power from all processors. For example: a 3GHz G5 will likely outperform a Dual 2GHz G5's on many tasks, even though 2x2GHz=4GHz. So, 64x1 GHz processors will not give the same result as one 30 GHz processor and so on.

Plus, its not like adding processors=same amount of heat. If I was to have a 1 GHz machine that I added another processor to, it would have greater heat.

But dual processors have dual frontside busses. wouldn't two 1.25 GHZ busses be faster than one?

anarkhy said:

But dual processors have dual frontside busses. wouldn't two 1.25 GHZ busses be faster than one?

Click to expand...

Yes, But the software dosnt take advantage of dual processors to its fullest potential. It is also, or so I have heard, quite hard to write dual processors optimized code. Even when its done very well, it dosnt take full advantage.

Again, this is not my area of expertise, so I could be wrong.