Ready to hit the wall?
Brian links an interesting article which specifies that the next generation Pentium chip from Intel is due to dissipate more than 100 Watts of heat.
This isn't surprising, as the current Itanium2 chips already crank out over 130 Watts of heat.
Why do these chips generate so much heat? Well, it's due mainly to their relatively inefficient instruction set and use of ultra-high power consumption transistors. Due to the huge complexity of the x86 instruction set, it's effectively impossible to make a fast Intel chip run cool.
What you see shipping in a new Dell is fundamentally the same chip design as the original CISC 8086 processor, only with its clock speed cranked up to hell, its manufacturing process refined considerably, and eleventy billion new instructions thrown in over the last 20 years.
This might not seem like such a big deal for a single home computer, but when you stick a few dozen or a few hundred machines together, the cooling and power costs soon become very significant indeed.
Some other processor designs, specifically RISC units like IBM's PowerPC chips, use significantly less power and very efficient instruction sets to accomplish the same thing, and don't have to be pushed to maximum power (and heat dissipation) to achieve maximum performance.
The interesting thing about Intel's (and AMD for that matter) continued trend of pushing clock speeds higher and higher on what amounts to the same old chip design is that they're eventually going to run into a wall, and heat dissipation and power demands are no longer going to be something that marketing droids can scoff at. When your processor is hot enough to melt plastic a few inches away, and sucks up more power than the average air conditioner, consumers are going to start raising eyebrows.
When will this happen? Well, sooner than most think, and probably within the next three or four years. Intel can only cheat the laws of physics for so long, and can only have their marketing guys belittle power and heat concerns for so long. Once chip speeds start approaching the double-digit Gigahertz range, using current Intel architectures, the average single chip will be putting out more heat per square inch than the average Nuclear Power Plant.
So, either Intel is going to have to do something really amazing such as develop fiber optic interconnects, which will make their processors amazingly more expensive, or switch to a radically different chip design.
Like, say, RISC. Now wouldn't that be ironic?
posted by Mr. Lion
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