[gameprogrammer] Re: What do the new processors mean for game programming?
- From: Robert Chafer <rob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2005 09:01:16 +0000
>
> The whole point of what is happening to processor development right now
> is that Moore's law is cranking right along doubling the number of
> transistors you can put on a chip every couple of years. But, at the
> same time, scaling effects have kicked in that make it very very hard to
> make those transistors run faster. Used to be the reduction in
> transistor size driven by Moore's law automagically gave you faster
> transistors. For the last few years that has not been true. You get more
> transistors that run at the same, or slightly slower, speeds. So, you
> *MUST* make use of parallelism to get better performance.
>
Another real issue is that as soon as the signals get off chips the
slow to a crawl. Even a 800MHz FSB is only a quarter of the speed of
the CPU. The approach has been to build bigger pipelines and bigger
caches on chip -- thereby reducing the number of off-chip fetches.
However with huge pipelines (the Prescot is 31 deep I think) any
slight stall is catastrophic. The idea is to simplify the coe CPU a
bit and increase the number of them. It will reduce peak speed (at
least for serial code) but decrease the effect of stalls and slow
devices.
--
Rob Chafer
Silverfrost
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