What's going on with process tech does not really have to be understood at
the detail level to see the picture. IBM chief technologists, among
others, have told us of the "end of scaling" - Intel has demonstrated the
effect with 90nm P4. We know, as Keith has said right here, that the two
critical issues involved are power density and leakage. OTOH nobody is
talking of abandoning 65nm and lower, though they do talk of increasing
difficulty.
But I don't know whether to take "the end of scaling" seriously or
not. What about nanotubes?
It doesn't matter, anyway? Hell, I don't know. Suppose you could
raise the computational density by a factor of a thousand. What kinds
of robotic widgets might we see as a result, for example?
One of the results is dual or twin core CPUs, in order to be able to offer
continuing levels of performance improvement. Intel is presenting
something this week on new power management involving 64 levels of control,
even for the next Itanium.
Especially for the next Itanium, I would have thought.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that Intel has "lost the playbook" but their
ego seems to be getting in the way when technology sharing is the way the
rest of the industry is moving.
Intel is a cash cow. It's a weak defense, but they do behave better
than M$, which completely substitutes market domination for
competence.
Really? I'm baffled as to why that's what Intel wants.
Keith and I effectively already had that discussion. Intel wants
enterprise applications locked onto Itanium the way they are locked
onto IBM mainframes. In that horse race, x86 is a sideshow--or Intel
wants it to be a sideshow. ;-).
Yes, indeed. And that's why I get so bent out of shape about some of
the choices our esteemed national assets, er, laboratories, have been
making in hardware. Problems can define hardware, but it can (and
actually does) work the other way around.
There's so much "noise" in the numbers for the energy production and usage
business... further blurred by the media dishing out such fraudulent junk
as the "hydrogen economy" being a way forward... or soccer-Moms in Iowa
telling us how "green" they feel by burning ethanol in their FFT SUVs. ô_Ô
The way I see it, unless some mind-boggling new technology is discovered,
the only "something else" to switch to from oil is nuclear. Of course, the
way the media has put it, the masses seem to have this weird idea that oil
supply is just going to dry up one day/year/decade... which is absurd.
If you ignore the ravings of the Malthusians and just look at what the
U.S. govt. is putting out, there are some interesting things
happening, and I'm never quite sure what's real and what's show.
There is an ORNL report that says, effectively, that, if you include
things like tar sands, you can forget about ever seeing a peak in oil
production, unless something dramatic happens to affect human
longevity.
OTOH, some of the noise about the hydrogen economy is coming from
within the U.S. govt., and some from contractors funded by the DoD.
If you look over the history of oil since 1974, it's been a history of
the kinds of surprises that you (and Keith) apparently favor: small
individually but important in the sum. Because it has been immensely
profitable (much more profitable than developing renewable energy
sources) people have just gotten smarter and smarter about finding and
extracting oil. As far as I can tell, none of the technology
developments that have reshaped the industry (albeit very quietly)
were foreseen in 1974. Meanwhilst, the revolutions that were supposed
to happen (nuclear, for example) still haven't happened.
One read is that "renewables" and "the hydrogen economy" coming from
Washington are really a message to oil-producing states: "We don't
need you." For all I know, some deeply cynical person inside the
government was thinking that way in 1974. The fear of even the
possibility of realistic alternatives to oil is what has kept OPEC in
line.
The lesson I draw from the oil business is one that Keith thinks I
don't understand: money drives everything. Until someone can count on
making the same kind of money displacing oil they can make by
producing it, people will continue to get smarter about producing oil
than to look for ways to displace it.
That very same mentality, of course, meant that DEC, IBM, et al, were
completely caught off guard by the attack of the killer micros. By
the time *they* could see the money on the table, the swarm was
already all over them.
As I've said before, steady progress with the odd discontinuity is fine
with me; it's also the way that the application of science to engineering
solutions has traditionally worked, with few exceptions.
It's hard to argue with a statement like that since steady progress
with a finite number of discontinuities covers a pretty broad class of
functions. You do seem to be ruling out functions that aren't
Riemann-integrable. ;-).
As for AMD, we'll see if they can come up with something to tackle the
notebook market... but there's nothing about Centrino which changes or
defines any rules.
Oh, but I think it did. Everybody's got a wireless laptop, and
Centrino is the brand of choice. Big marketing score for Intel at a
time when they did just about everything else wrong.
Centrino isn't tied into connectivity in any kind of fundamental way,
but the drumbeat of the message is there: it isn't the processor
that's important, anymore, it's the whole platform. That's the battle
Intel has defined, and PCI-Xpress, Advanced Switching, and heaven only
knows what else are going to stomp Hypertransport. I understand why
the crowd here isn't pleased emotionally, but, unless those emotions
gain wider acceptance (something like what probably is happening to
Microsoft), Intel will do just fine.
RM
