[extropy-chat] ECON: Chip market responds to high oil prices...

[Gary Miller]

I agree Intel is not switching to multicore to compensate for higher oil
prices.

Rather their R&D efforts to reduce current leakage at higher clock speeds as
they moved to smaller die masks failed!

They could not go above 3.8 Ghz without asking PC makers to resort to liquid
cooling.

That would have added considerable expense to the PC and the major makers
balked at it.

Intel then put their other parallel development project for multicore on the
fast track and made a whole host of minor improvements to keep the customers
buying/upgrading until they could deliver dual core chips which run at
slower Ghz and thus produce less heat.

Too bad that 95% of the software on the home market is not multithreaded and
can't benefit greatly from dual core technology. 

In the process they also added 64 bit capability to chips.  Also for which
no software exists to benefit the home user.

Even though Windows 64 bit is released very few applications will be release
until mid 2006.  

Even then the majority of them will be aimed towards the business server
market.

I know someone will bring up that there are 64 bit Linux releases available
and that is true.

But it is in my opinion a shortage of software and user friendliness to the
uninitiated that has held Linux back on the desktop.

I imagine that Intel is might worried about AMD now since AMD is currently
running ahead of them in both the dual and single core benchmarks.  Also AMD
is running at a lower clockrate than what Intel maxed out at.
That makes me believe that AMD still has room to jack up their clockrates in
a few new chip generations without hitting the overheating problem that
Intel hit at 4Ghz.

Even though Moore's law with respect to the number on circuit elements
doubling every 18 months will be maintained, our applications will no longer
double in speed until they have all been rewritten for a multithreaded
architecture.

Regards Gary Miller.



>>Where do you get the idea that the chipmakers are responding to high oil
prices?  Performance per watt has been the buzz for a few years at least due
to cooling and battery life problems.  Intel just got around to a complete
product line revamp around this now.
If they had been responding to recently higher oil prices I expect it
would've taken them longer, as they would've started later.
Besides, oil accounts for only 3% of US electricity generation: