Come on.. Why dont they just..

[Slurgi]

I figured I put a fairly catchy name so people would view this and i could get some responces. (me clever)

Anyway, as I was sitting eating pie upstairs, a vision came to me. A vision I could not seem to break from. An idea simply MADE SENSE to me!

Why not make sockets bigger, so CPU's can run faster, has larger caches, and be able to increase the size of the die as to increase the heat dispersion.

My first thought was to have a fairly large unit attatched to a small portion of the motherboard. Simply because that is what my Pentium2 I am on now (ummm... heatsink broke old CPU have to get new one, if anyone read my earlier thread). I then realized you would probably need to attatch it to the motherboard, because you have to have a lot of electrical wires running from it, and also that any bit of distance you add increases time to move a signal that much.

Then I began thinking...

A larger CPU would make it so that many more transistors could fit on the die. More transistors = more computing power.

Tell me, why NOT make Socket-A processors bigger?

[sockmonkey]

it was my understanding that closer together=faster from a to b with less work. which means less heat and more mhz i think.

[Larry Quinn]

Give that man a cigar!!!

You hit it...
The tighter the "Print" of the cpu pattern..the more speed can be gained w/o GENERATING big heat!

Also for the rest of the story ..you need look no further than the now defunct Pentium Pro.
Now THAT was one BIG CPU!!!!!!

The core still exists today in the form of the Pentium 2-4...
the on die cach (SP) needed to shrink in order to run at the FSB of the CPU.


Good idea tho...glad to see your thinking!!!!

Larry

[FRANK]

closer tranststors need less voltage,
less voltage equals less heat,
less heat means you can use smaller traces,
smaller traces mean more CPU cores from one wafer,
more cores from one wafer mean more profit.

Along with the advantages for the CPU manufacturers, there are also benefits for the card maufacturers as well as anything that uses electronics.

It really is a win-win for everybody involved, from manufacturers all the way to the end user.

[Thelemac]

And with smaller processess, you would be hard pressed to make it big.

Smaller process == more transitor in a smaller place. Many more. :)

[foxmulder]

It seems like the best way to up computing power would be multi processor systems. Heck with Athlon prices the way they are we could have 4 1.4Ghz Athlons for the price we used to pay for a PII 266 three years ago. The only problem is a lack of mobos and software to take advantage of this situation.

I think it woul be a good way to go though because it would mean more sales for chipmakers. Sinc it has in the past proven to be nearly impossible to raise prices they're going to have to thinkk of something.

[oc jason]

i think you guys misunderstood him. Same tight packed core, just say 2x bigger 0.15 micron process, just say 50 million resistors, instead of 25. something. That would actually work but LORD THE HEAT!!! They might have to once they max out the 0.13 micron process core.

[Slurgi]

Yea, I was thinking along the lines of what [OC]Jason said.

Yes, it would need more voltage and that would up the heat a heluvalot, but if they had a proper cooling solution...

If There could be a slightly better solution that water cooling...some sort of chemical substance other than water that wont hurt electrical boards and yet not evaporate, still be viscous, and prevents biological growth. With scientists working harder than ever to make new substances like that cheap and available, a cooling system similar to water cooling is not far down the line i imagine.

Then they could potentialy make processors bigger and thus faster, correct?

[oc jason]

i believe that they could, but the real issue is (im gonna pop ur baloon) is that the hardware we have now is a major bottleneck for even 1gig + processors. They up grade cpu's like every 2 weeks, but the hardware is so far behind. Look a floppy drives - ya we hardly ever use them but a 1.4gig reads it the same speed of a p2 450. Hardware slows us down. Hold us back. They need to release faster hardware like nvidia releases new drivers. a 52x cdrom is still 52x at 500 or 1500mhz correct? See my point - smae with HD's ya we can run RAID but still the plates only spin so fast and the cpu has to wait - even RAM slows us down - thats why some peeps get enough physical ram to hold an entire Opewrating system and boot off of a RAm drive. To totally bypass booting of the HD

[Slurgi]

I realize that hardware is a bottleneck. Sure, drives can have access times faster than people once imagined and they run at 125000 rpm. Receiving the information will always be a problem. Yet still, a faster processor WOULD process the received information faster, and a difference would be seen. Hard drives need to somehow be changed, I am unsure of how, but they do need changing.

Also, as you said, RAM is far, far behind. DDR pc2100 actually has a latency of 133 x 8 x 2. Ram holds way, way more information than it once did, yet has increased in LATENCY much less.

Eventually What we need are faster bus speeds and frequencies, so maybe the pentium4 has the right idea.

Floppy drives blow... who uses them?

All this considered, a faster/larger processor WOULD still have an increased performance...

[Kingslayer]

Why?

$

That's why.

[Slurgi]

Eh.... good reason

[The Coolest]

Originally posted by Kingslayer
Why?

$

That's why.

U stole my line... ;)

[fuzzba11]

Technology always strives to be both smaller and faster. If computer makers had decided to make their chips larger and larger from the beginning imagine what a CPU would look like today!! And, of course, the question of quantity of material per chip keeps the size being driven down.

[kevin_bouchard]

I believe that harddrives will be replaced with a pci storage device(with ram chips), yes they already made some, there was a user here that put a post about it. That could take care of the hardrives but there is still ram,floppys and cdroms.

[Slurgi]

Removable media will always be important. Thats why CD's will probably be around for quite a while longer. Floppies will probably stick around another year or so, but when CD-R's really pick up speed and burning accuracy, count the floppy out.

If there could be 40gb+ hard drives in PCI slots, that could eventually eliminate the need of RAM, assuming they could get those up to speed.

I just think anything that has 'electric tape' will eventually be weeded out. Hard drives will be replaced, just give it a few years...

whats the link to that post? I want to see the pci slot hard drive.