The future of the single core processors

Over at Anandtech they’ve published the first article on what is to become a series of interesting texts. The series will discuss how we are to reach better performance with today’s, and the future’s, processors. The first article discusses today’s market and reflects upon the up and coming launch of the dual core processors.
They discuss what went wrong with Intel’s earlier plans for “all you need is MHz”, and more specific the Prescott-arcitecture, which has to be looked upon a failure.

There are several obstacles that have appeared along the way the last couple of years and heat dissipation and power concumption are some of the bigger. Anandtech tries to get to the bottom of these issues and one of the more obvious conclusions are “leakage”.

“Leakage is such a huge problem that it could, in theory, make any advance in process technology useless. Without countermeasures, a 45 nm Pentium 4 would consume 100 to 150 Watts on leakage alone, and up to burn 250 Watts in total. The small die would go up in smoke before the ROM program would have finished the POST sequence.”

They discuss the problems of today’s processor arcitectures but also what solutions we can look forward to.
The result is a very interesting article that later on will be completed by a sequel on the dual core’s arcitectures, future and what we should be able to expect from them.

The first part of Anandtech’s article can be found here.