The state of personal computing hardware circa 2008. Presented at an Adobe internal software development conference.

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1
The (Near) Future of
Personal Computers
Kevin Goldsmith
Engineering Manager
Core Technologies

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2008 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.

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2008 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.

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2008 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.

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2008 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.

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2008 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.

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2008 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.

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“Where a calculator on the
ENIAC is equipped with 18,000
vacuum tubes and weighs 30
tons, computers in the future
may have only 1,000 vacuum
tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5
tons.”
—Popular Mechanics
March 1949
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9. Why Performance Matters to Adobe

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Why Do We Need to Increase Performance?
Advanced UIs
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Why Do We Need to Increase Performance?
More megapixels
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Why Do We Need to Increase Performance?
Realtime HD
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Why Do We Need to Increase Performance?
Advanced Disc
Formats
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14. The Past of Hardware

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Some Terminology
Floating Point Operations Per Second
1,000,000,000,000
FLOP MFLOP GFLOP TFLOP
100,000,000,000
10,000,000,000
10,000
1,000
100
10
1
100,000
1,000,000
10,000,000
100,000,000
1,000,000,000
1
1,000,000
1,000,000,000
1,000,000,000,000

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MFLOPS
10,000
1,000
100
10
1
100,000
0.1
2005 2008
1990
1975
1960
1945
1,000,000

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MFLOPS
10,000
1,000
100
10
1
100,000
0.1
2005 2008
1990
1975
1960
1945
1,000,000
ENIAC (1945)
500 FLOPs (estimated)

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MFLOPS
10,000
1,000
100
10
1
100,000
0.1
2005 2008
1990
1975
1960
1945
1,000,000
ENIAC (1945)
80 MFLOPs (estimated)
Cray 1A (1975)

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MFLOPS
10,000
1,000
100
10
1
100,000
0.1
2005 2008
1990
1975
1960
1945
1,000,000
ASCI RED (1996)
ENIAC (1945)
Cray 1A (1975)

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MFLOPS
10,000
1,000
100
10
1
100,000
0.1
2005 2008
1990
1975
1960
1945
1,000,000
1 TFLOP!
ENIAC (1945)
ASCI RED (1996)
Cray 1A (1975)

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10,000
1,000
100
10
1
100,000
0.1
2005 2008
1990
1975
1960
1945
1,000,000
MFLOPS

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10,000
1,000
100
10
1
100,000
0.1
2005 2008
1990
1975
1960
1945
1,000,000
MFLOPS

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10,000
1,000
100
10
1
100,000
0.1
2005 2008
1990
1975
1960
1945
1,000,000
MFLOPS
Pentium 4
8080 486
Penryn

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10,000
1,000
100
10
1
100,000
0.1
2005 2008
1990
1975
1960
1945
1,000,000
MFLOPS
15-20 years

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How to keep up with the Joneses
(or the supercomputers as the case may be)?

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More transistors
on the chip

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More transistors
on the chip
Smaller transistors
+

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More transistors
on the chip Smaller transistors
+ + Faster clocks

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More transistors
on the chip Smaller transistors
+ +
Faster clocks
More compute
power every
year forever!
=

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More transistors
on the chip Smaller transistors
+ +
Faster clocks
More compute
power every
year forever!
until 2004!
=

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What Happened?

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10,000
1,000
100
10
1
The Power Wall
‘70
Power Density Extrapolation
‘80 ‘90 ‘00 ‘10
Power
Density
(W/cm2)
8080 486
Pentium Processors

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10,000
1,000
100
10
1
The Power Wall
‘70
Power Density Extrapolation
‘80 ‘90 ‘00 ‘10
Power
Density
(W/cm2)
Hot Plate
8080 486
Pentium Processors

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10,000
1,000
100
10
1
The Power Wall
‘70
Power Density Extrapolation
‘80 ‘90 ‘00 ‘10
Power
Density
(W/cm2)
Hot Plate
8080 486
Pentium Processors
Nuclear Reactor

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10,000
1,000
100
10
1
The Power Wall
‘70
Power Density Extrapolation
‘80 ‘90 ‘00 ‘10
Power
Density
(W/cm2)
Hot Plate
8080 486
Pentium Processors
Nuclear Reactor
Rocket Nozzle

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10,000
1,000
100
10
1
The Power Wall
‘70
Power Density Extrapolation
‘80 ‘90 ‘00 ‘10
Power
Density
(W/cm2)
Hot Plate
8080 486
Pentium Processors
Nuclear Reactor
Rocket Nozzle
Sun’s Surface

37. The Current of Hardware

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More MHz is No Longer the Answer for Better Performance
2008 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.
Faster clock =
more heat
more errors
more cache misses

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How to keep the party going?
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More Cores is the Answer (for now)
§ Physics says we can’t keep increasing the clock
rate
§ But, we can keep adding transistors (for now)
§ Solution: more cores / die

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Four Cores Per CPU Now
Intel Penryn
45 nm
81 GFLOPs
410 million transistors
AMD Barcelona
65 nm
75 GFLOPs (estimate)

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General Purpose Computation Using Graphics Hardware - GPGPU

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GPUs
Nvidia GeForce 8800/Tesla
§ Up to 128 stream processors
§ Up to 518 GFLOPs
§ Up to 103.7 GB/sec local memory bandwidth
§ 12000+ simultaneous threads
ATI HD 3800
§ 320 Stream processors
§ 497+ GFLOPs
§ 72 GB/Sec memory bandwidth
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A TeraFLOP in 2007
AMD “TeraFLOP in a box”
AMD Opteron dual-core with
2 R600 cards ($450 for most
expensive chip, $465 per most
expensive card)
Intel Polaris
§ 80 heterogeneous cores
§ 275 mm square
§ Mesh network connections
between adjacent cores, main
processor and stacked memory
§ Research prototype
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1996 -> 2007
For the same amount of processing power, Polaris uses
0.013% as much electricity in 0.000336% of space!

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The Future

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More (multi) Cores
x ?

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Non-homogenous (many) Cores on a Die
+
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Old Bus Architectures
Front Side Bus
CPU CPU
RAM RAM
Memory Controller

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New Bus Architectures
CPU CPU
RAM RAM
RAM RAM
RAM
RAM
RAM
RAM

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Faster Busses
PCIe 2 x32
3200 MB/s = 45CDs!

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Compilers/Languages
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New Processor Technologies
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Conclusion