A look at the future
06.23.06 - 11:16am
Over the last week or so a lot of interesting things have popped up over the internet in regards to computing and overclocking. Some of these things we will see within 6 months and some of them we won’t see for a few years, but the fact is that they are around.
Intel’s Big Little Monster
This is no joke, Intel has a monster and when they unleash it, every other processor manufacturer had better run away, fast. This new Core architecture is biting heads off left and right and the quad-core Kentsfield processor just entered the fray. While this early production processor doesn’t have killer clocks it does have four fully functional cores that can scale from 2.4GHz up to 3.2GHz on stock voltage. This is the important factor here, stock voltage. Once you can push the voltage up a bit, I wouldn’t doubt it being possible to have 3.6+GHz Kentsfield processors crunching away. The only problem will be price, expect these badboys to come at a price that will make your wallet hurt.
For those of you that don’t want to pay upwards of $900 for a processor, the dual-core Conroe will still be a step in the right direction. The best news with these processors is that they will all share the same chipset, the 975x. This means if you buy a cheap Conroe and a decent 975x board now, in a year if you feel the urge, you will be able to upgrade to a mid-range Kentsfield and not have to replace anything else. I myself might be looking into this after seeing the very promising results from Conroe and Kentsfield.
Big Blue and nano wires
I’m sure everyone by now has heard about the 500GHz transistor that IBM and Georgia Tech managed to create. If you didn’t manage to hear about it, the New York Times decided this was important. While it took very extreme cooling, just a few degrees above absolute zero, this transistor still managed to function at 350GHz at room temperature. The other essential improvement that I found was some research done on nano wires. These nano wires will become very useful when the current lithography processes to create ultraviolet-silicon based processors reach their limit. In the report I read, the researchers were able to create wires that were 6 nanometers and thinner. While this process won’t be useful for a few years, it does help the industry by giving it a route to pursue for the future. According to information on Intel’s latest roadmap, they have a lithographic process that will scale them all the way down to 22 nanometers which might then begin to push the limits of their new “Extreme Ultraviolet” lithographic process. No matter what though, we have another 3 years of established processor speed bumps so nobody should be worried about us straying too far from Moore’s Law.
ATi at 80nm
Traditionally all other computer components lag behind processors in regards to their manufacturing processes. However ATi might actually be running a smaller process than AMD when their 80 nanometer chips go live in October. With these new 80nm chips expect some clockspeed bumps and even more headroom for some massive overclocks on ATi cards. Another benefit that the buyer might not see is the decreased cost of manufacturing 80nm cores versus larger processes. Since the die is smaller, more dice can be made per wafer which will help increase yields. Maybe the upper-midrange cards will once again drop below $250.
It looks like there will be exciting times for computing in the future, comparable to when the K8 architecture from AMD released a few years ago. Look for some serious price cuts from AMD as they try and combat Conroe and look for Intel slash prices on all its older models. If you plan on building a PC anytime soon I would highly suggest trying to future proof yourself as much as possible by going with a 975x Intel motherboard, you won’t regret it when you want to upgrade to Conroe in the near future.
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