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To: ThePythonicCow
Ah thanks...

The early beginnings of the next Supercomputer strain:

IBM unsheathes Cell blade server

11 posted on 06/02/2005 4:59:31 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach (This tagline no longer operative....floated away in the flood of 2005 ,)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach
IBM's Cell processors, as well as the dual core processors from AMD and Intel, and the multiple core processors at the heart of the next generation of Xbox and Playstation video game consoles, are all part of an inevitable trend that has been in progress for a half century now.

There are several natural package sizes for computers - a room, a filing cabinet size box, a rack or drawer, a board, a processor package, and now a cpu core within such a processor package.

The fundamental change, underlying pretty much all else, for the last half century, has been the shrinking of logic, the size of a bit of storage or a logic gate. As it shrunk, first one of the above natural package sizes, then perhaps a decade later, the next size down, became the natural size of a single computer processor unit (CPU) - that thing which executes a single stream of logical instructions on a set of data.

Then, as the natural size shrank a little further, we put more than one CPU in a package. First it was multiple CPU's in a room, then in a box, then in a rack, then on a board, and now in a processor package. There have always been practical limits on how many CPU's we could cram into any particular package size - due to limits on how fast we could pump data into them, and extract data and heat from them. But at each size, we have quickly pushed to get perhaps 2 or 8 or 32 CPU's in a package.

Before now, this work on parallel computing always occurred alongside the work in continuing to shrink CPUs down to fit in the next natural size package.

Due to the enormous expense of original design work on CPUs at the wafer level, and due to the enormous constraints that the major players (basically Intel and IBM) can impose on anyone trying to interlope at that level, I do not think there is a smaller package size.

The processor package, that square inch of branded plastic, semiconductor, copper, aluminum and ceramic, is the last natural size.

Now the use of multiple CPUs has arrived at the processor package size, and will ship in rapidly increasing quantity this year and the next few years.

The breath taking and rapid evolution of computer and hardware architectures over the last fifty years enters a new phase. Like the automobile, which has not changed packaging in any fundamental way in a century now, the computer has now arrived at the full range of packaging, from the large room fulling big honkin NUMA iron shown in pictures above, to the six or seven cores in the processor package of next years Playstation.

This range of packaging sizes is now established, and now we enter a period of refinement and elaboration.

17 posted on 06/02/2005 5:36:47 AM PDT by ThePythonicCow (To err is human; to moo is bovine.)
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