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Workstation Performance: Tomorrow's Possibilities (Viewpoint Column)
1 May, 2008 By: Simon FloydMore advances in hardware-related technology are on the horizon. What will you do with the ever-increasing power of your workstation?
Ever since digitization became commercially viable in the 1970s, one thing has remained constant: Hardware performance never seems to match our growing need to maximize productivity by working faster with less effort. This is true whether your first CAD system was MEDUSA on a Prime 2250 or Inventor 2008 on a Dell PC.
In the past, obtaining better performance was a relatively straightforward process. You simply acquired more megahertz, more RAM, or both. The decision to do so was most likely bound by financial constraints, but it was straightforward nonetheless. Today, however, purchasing the latest and greatest system doesn't always mean you're getting performance gains for your particular CAD application. Thankfully, though, there is a wealth of exciting new options on the horizon. But taking advantage of them requires an understanding of how those technologies affect the way we work and how they will interact with CAD in the future.
Predictions and Possibilities
In 1965, Intel engineer Gordon Moore made a profound statement that has held true through the decades. He predicted that the number of transistors in a silicon chip would double every two years and that evolution in technology would fuel global innovation at an exponential rate. Although Moore's Law still holds true today, how much longer will it do so and what will that mean?
The relationship between clock speed and performance has been, by far, the easiest dimension of performance to quantify: The higher the number, the faster your CAD application responded. As a result, software developers counted on it as a way of ensuring response times rather than investing time in finding other performance-enhancing approaches for CAD software. Although the trend for transistor densities has continued to steadily increase, clock speeds began slowing circa 2003 at 3 GHz. If we apply Moore's Law–type thinking to clock-speed performance, we should be able to buy at least 10 GHz CPUs. However, the fastest CPU available today is 3.80 GHz.
There's a simple reason why 10 GHz seems an improbability. Today's CPUs are power hungry (consuming 100 W is common) and consequently emit immense amounts of heat (figure 1). At the Intel Developer Forum in 2004, Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief technology officer and senior vice-president, said that the heat emitted from modern processors, measured in power density (Watts per square centimeter), rivaled the heat of a nuclear reactor core! Better still is the fantastic notion of CPU heat approaching the temperature of the Sun beyond 2010. This sounds like pure science fiction, but some say it could become reality.
 Figure 1. In CPU architecture today, heat is becoming an unmanageable problem. (Courtesy of Pat Gelsinger, Intel Developer Forum, Spring 2004) |
Regardless, the heat challenge has given life to a new generation of CPUs that enticingly offer the power, and presumably the performance, of two, four, and possibly more cores. If CPU manufacturers can double the number of cores every two years, we could see 128-core CPUs by 2018. Imagine buying a personal computing device in 2018 with near-supercomputing performance!
The Digital Brain: Science or Fiction?
In the television show Battlestar Galactica, the human race of the distant future regrets developing a slave race of robots. These robots evolve to become synthetic humanoids that eventually threaten human existence as they struggle to understand their role as sentient life forms.
This scenario seems utterly fantastic in the true sense of the word. You might even say impossible: A machine thinking for itself and being capable of self-improvement (both physically and mentally) with intelligence that surpasses its human inventors isn't possible, right? Could a computer ever match human brainpower?
 Q&A with Simon Floyd |
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