"We might be ahead of Apple's product release cycle, and we've probably violated our Mac Pro's warranty, but we just had to see what the Apple Mac Pro could do when populated with a pair of Intel's brand-new quad-core Xeon 5355 processors," Daniel A. Begun reports for CNET. They conclude: "Unless you do work normally relegated to high-end workstations, perform massively multitasking workloads, or just want the bragging rights, eight cores is definitely overkill - at least for now."
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Member since:2006-02-19
This is same as with clock speed and even more.
All transistors are dissipating heat. Amount of that heat cannot be less than needed to distinct in reliable way o and 1 at given speed.
Putting more transistor into same or lesser volume, you meet that barrier - more heat and in way much harder to cool down.
Other problems - too thin insulator layers inside transistor structure, causing leaks, additional power dissipation and unreliability.
One more, related to first. To avoid overheating with high density packaging, you need to reduce voltage/current which leads to lesser amount of charges acting in switch. Down to some tens of electrons - which means, together with all that noise, incl generated by heat-electrons, that schematics is going even more unreliable again.
Edited 2006-11-16 00:51
Member since:
2005-07-29
No longer will Moore's Law matter as the race for efficiently cuppled multi-core processors becomes the dominant market thrust.
We're seeing multi-core processors because of Moore's law.
Moore's law has nothing to do with clock speed. It has to do with the number of transistors available:
"the number of transistors that can be fit onto a square inch of silicon doubles every 12 months."
(Source: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/moore.ars)
Power consumption and physics acted as barriers to clock speed, but physics has not (yet) become a barrier to the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a silicon wafer.
So if transistors keep getting cheaper (because they keep getting smaller, so you can fit more of them within the same area), what do you do with all those extra transistors?
You either make your processors smaller, allowing you to create more processors at once (making them cheaper to manufacture), or you keep the processor the same physical size but place more functionality onto the processor.
Behold: multi-core processors -- placing more functionality into the processor.
It's all in keeping with Moore's law.