Is The Futur Quad Core?

[gobbly2100]

Hey,

I really wonder if the future is really going to be quad core or if it is simply because technology is slowing down and they need to bring new products at a consistent pace so they thought "I know, lets just add more"

I can understand duel core, that makes sense but I really wonder if quad core is really the way to go.

What do you think?

[zeekgenateer]

As processor technology increases I think that base core speed (what 1 core can do) will matter less and less. The future isn't quad cores, it's octacores and hexacores. As I've said if you have eight cores running at 750 MHz you have a total speed of around 6 GHz. Also power consumption will start to have a bigger role. You need to power those 8 chips efficiently to save energy and to decrease heat output. I'm looking forward to these multi-core beasts. Hopefully motherboard speeds will keep up!

[Corbs]

The future is multi-core processors/multi threading. Assigning specific tasks to each processor in order to render/process something quicker. Once they truly start exploiting multi threading, you can expect having multiple cores giving you a greater advantage.

Intel shows off 80-core processor

[gobbly2100]

You have some very good points there actually, also right now the bottleneck on computers is generaly the hard disk as it is mechanical, that is soon changing though which is going to be super sweet.

Maybe I will get a duel CPU motherboard with 2 quad cores plonked on top

[zeekgenateer]

There are people working on holographic disks, which could store immense amounts of data. I think the number is around 1,000 TB but of course right now it's not so cost effective and the technology needs work. What would I do with 1,000 TB... I know I'd download the entire internet !

[Amphiron]

Holographic disks sound interesting. *opens google*

[DevgruSeal]

Haha, that's an entire Petabyte

And if you're going to try downloading the internet on this theoretical petabyte disk, I want whatever ISP you're using. That's a fat pipe. And you'll need a lot of those drives. The Wayback Machine alone uses about 2 Petabytes. Google uses 20-200 petabytes.
Amphiron: Holographic Versatile Disc - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[connnnn]

If you have a ton of cpu's, all being delegated to different tasks, isn't the name a bit inaccurate :X

I guess 1 way to visualize things is that we might be talking about processor cores the same way we talk about transistors now. Not to the same scale, but the same general idea. They get smaller and more compact and energy efficient, and the more you can squeeze into 1 main processing cluster, the better...

[Raphael]

I'm looking forward to the new 16 core processors Intels working on to also integrate the GPU's on them. Bye bye graphics cards

[badn]

More cores is not necessarily a solution. More cores brings more overhead; which at some point will nullify the advantage of delegating computing tasks. It's an obvious fact that CPU frequencies have to go down with the current transistor technology simply because of the vast amounts of heat produced.

However, given the upcoming transistor technology (Depleted Substrate) that will not be the case. As such, increasing core-count might come to a halt once they're in use and architectures might even revert back to using a smaller amount of cores.

To answer the OP's question: yes, they're definately the future. The near future, it's too soon make statements about 5+ years from now.

Originally Posted by Raphael

I'm looking forward to the new 16 core processors Intels working on to also integrate the GPU's on them. Bye bye graphics cards

You'll get disappointed when you find out they won't be anywhere near an actual seperate GPU at said time though.