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http://news.com.com/2100-1006-5199930.html
That looks amazing. Might this be the future? Certainly will be for us geeks if it gets along any farther. Talk about speed boosts... Think of what would happen if they could get one up to clock speeds of even 1Ghz... at 300mhz its already faster than a P4...
The reason this thing would outperform a P4 at 2GHz while only being clocked at 300MHz is because it has four times number of registers and each register is at triple the bit size. Don't kid yourself into thinking that this processor will be running any x86 apps at the moment. At best that is a lot of work and access to the sources (meaning MS will likely not be releasing anything for this processor), and at works it will mean running a highly cusotmized unix / linux type operating system. Everything you will want to run will have to be compiled using their compiler, or it will either not run, or potentially it will run on par with any other RISC processor at 300mhz.
Keep in mind, "outperforming a 2ghz processor" does't tell you jack about what they are doing. If they are doing 128-bit integer math, of course their processor has an advantage over say, a P4. The P4 can only handle 32 bit integer math. Ignoring any other limitations, the P4 at 2GHz is still effectively only a 500MHz processor (it takes 4 clock cycles to perform 128-bit integer math on a 32-bit processor). Without knowing reliably what the tests are, there's no way to say for sure whether they mean anything.
Still, it's some really neat technology, and could be the starting point for some better stuff down the road.
Hi cshs,
If you dont mind, do you think you could explain this in laymans terms for me please?
"Ignoring any other limitations, the P4 at 2GHz is still effectively only a 500MHz processor (it takes 4 clock cycles to perform 128-bit integer math on a 32-bit processor)."
Thank you very much!
128 divided by 32 is 4... Does that help any? The P4 uses 32 integer math, so it takes it 4 times through to finish all 128 bits... 2000mhz divided by 4 equals 500mhz, so hence that part. Hope you figured it out now!