Changes: CPU Architecture

What changes are coming in CPU architecture? Does anyone have idea..?

And if you can imagine, of course include their impact on programming.

I'll make two predictions about CPUs in the future.

They will be faster.
They will be Smaller.

;)

In all honesty, I think AMD is going to adopt a mega bandwidth approach like the Pentium 4 with their branch of processor... IE, not an evolution of the Athlon, but the next platform. Other than that though, I am not sure.

x86 is dead intel will stop using it in one of their next big line of chips! though i think they will retain compatibility somehow.

The new pentium chip seems like it's going to be pretty good. I'm not sure what AMD will come out with though. I thought I heard the Athlon architecture won't be able to go over 2G. So it looks like they'll be coming out with another chip. I agree that they will get smaller and faster though.

we now have higher precision etching so we wil move towards smaller components, if the chips stay the same size there will be more psace for gates which = higher speed, so faster yes but not necessarily smaller.

Short time changes:

The electronics of a CPU is getting smaller, though there is a physical boundary. At some day we will say that the components can't get smaller in combination with the traditional techniques.

There are CPU's which are able to do parallel processing. I think it is just a matter of time when PC's will be equipped with these CPU's.

Long time changes:

There is research going on in the field of quantumbits and that kind of things. At this moment the researchers are able to use an electron as bit. This is very very interesting. But it will take a long time to go before this really can be applied.

I recently read a report from laboratory that they are able to use light in certain electronic circuits. But there are some complications with it. CPU's which use light as the signals will be incredibly fast. But also this will take some time before it will be really applicable.

2010 silicon chips can't get faster, or smaller using current methods.

2020 chips can no longer get smaller,and faster, despite advanced methods. Chips also cost a lot more.

Hmm...I think that in a few years, we are going to hit the boundaries of how small we can get a transistor or whatever. Even now they are starting to have problems with it, and eventually it'll be TOO small. Although, we will probably find a way around it. Humans always tend to do that, no matter what the feat.

heh, i dont give a damn if my processer is a square foot ,as long as i get my 200GHz with it ;)

LoL! 200 gHz? Hmm...Most games would be pretty smooth!

Now you can get a 'wearable' motherboard. Where is the battery though?

http://www.sensatex.com/

I think the near future is IA-64. I have the Intel books on the Itanium processor, although haven't heard much about it. It has about 128 floating point registers and 128 general purpose registers. It also has control structures that can do prediction and all kinds of other stuff. It saves cycles by using these control structures - and there are a lot of them. Don't know a lot about it yet thus I'm still studying the whole architecture.
I'm still reading about it and it's very complex, but opens up a lot of areas for programmers both on the system level and the application level - especially in compilers.

Protektor told me these chips were on the market and are very expensive but again, I've not seen much about them. AMD is also working on x86-64 to produce it's equiv of IA-64. I don't think they are the same, but they are very close.