Due to the heat constraint, future chip improvements will come from increased parallelism over multiple processors rather than simple clock speed increases. This also means that software developers will need to focus on parallelism to create faster code rather than simply waiting for the clock speed to increase.
sstritte
I found the rest of this article to be a useful, clear explanation of some of the main points we hit during this lecture:
'the challenge of overcoming the effects of heat generated by the constant on-off movement of tiny switches in modern computers' -- this refers to dynamic power.
'transistors ... have become increasingly more porous, permitting electric current - and heat - to cascade out even when they are switched out' -- this refers to static power.
'Classical scaling is dead' -- single instruction stream performance isn't really increasing anymore.
'software developers may come to Intel's rescue. Future operating systems ... are being designed to perform substantially better with multiple processors.' -- no more free lunch! It's now on programmers to write parallel software.
ask
An interesting way to understand the concept of the thermal wall / power wall is with the analogy of vertical and horizontal scaling of resources in a cloud-computing context. You can go on adding resources to a single system for it to give better performance (vertical scaling) or add multiple systems with limited resources (horizontal scaling) to achieve better performance. At some point in vertical scaling, you cannot add further resources to the system as it is physically not possible to do so (analogous to the thermal wall).
Due to the heat constraint, future chip improvements will come from increased parallelism over multiple processors rather than simple clock speed increases. This also means that software developers will need to focus on parallelism to create faster code rather than simply waiting for the clock speed to increase.
I found the rest of this article to be a useful, clear explanation of some of the main points we hit during this lecture:
An interesting way to understand the concept of the thermal wall / power wall is with the analogy of vertical and horizontal scaling of resources in a cloud-computing context. You can go on adding resources to a single system for it to give better performance (vertical scaling) or add multiple systems with limited resources (horizontal scaling) to achieve better performance. At some point in vertical scaling, you cannot add further resources to the system as it is physically not possible to do so (analogous to the thermal wall).
Increasing clock speeds ~ Vertical scaling
Adding more processors ~ Horizontal scaling