Sunday 12 August 2007

Yes, I want two or three processors, thanks. Or 16 or 24.

Imaginary 2012

We continue our series of imaginary journal entries, each one set one year further into the wild blue. By now it is practically certain that I'm way off track, but it is one of the futures that could have been. If only...

Fiction starts here:

12. August 2012: Parallel Computer

The PC is dead, long live the PC!

Actually, my personal computer isn't dead yet, but it is certainly growing old by my standards. It is not so many years ago that I used to buy a new computer each year, some years two. Then again, when was there ever a time in my life when my money did not burn a hole in my pocket? At one time, I had over a hundred computer games, many of which I had never played through, some of them only played for a day or two. I had hundreds of CDs, many of which I never listened to anymore. Paperbacks enough to cover a wall. Computers are more expensive, and so I didn't buy hundreds of them. I wonder if I would, had I the money. Probably not, but twice a year for sure.

Well, I sit here dictating this on my Sims 3 computer which I bought in 2009. I mean, it runs Sims 3, the game to end all games. So what more could you want? Well, you could want it to not lag when running more than a handful of Sims with all the expansion packs installed. And you could want it to not die from old age any day now. That's why I have ordered a new computer, "the PC that is not a PC". (That it is payday today is of course completely incidental...)

Why do I call it "the PC that is not a PC"? Well, besides the obvious reference to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series and "the sword that is not a sword", this is the first time that PC stands for Parallel Computer rather than Personal Computer. Not that the new computer is not personal, but it is also parallel, and it is now official.

Both my Sims 3 computer and the previous, the Quad Dell, were in effect parallel computers. The Quad had two dual-core processors mounted in one unit, so the work was shared among four processors. In the next, the number was increased to eight, and the clock frequency was increased as well. So we have had parallel computers for a while now. Actually servers with multiple CPUs were common around the turn of the century already, so Windows has been able to use them to some extent for a long time already. For running multiple programs at the same time, this was ideal. And Windows itself has a number of tasks running at any one time, not to mention that any call a program makes to the operating system can be handled as a task and sent to the processor with the least load. More and more programs are also made to explicitly take advantage of multiple processors.

And yet, there is something new. And there is quite a bit of irony involved, starting with Moore's Law. Originally it stated that the number of transistors that could be put on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. It was widely quoted as "the capacity of computers doubles every 18 months", which did indeed seem the case during the Long Boom. The irony here is that Moore was a co-founder of Intel. And in the end, it was Intel that broke the Law. After the demise of AMD, the sole remaining competitor in PC processors, the pace of innovation crawled to a halt. The Reckoning probably did not help any: With the whole world in the grip of recession, new computers were not at the top of everyone's wish list. And in any case, low price became more important than new features. Rather than building new factories, Intel continued churning out the same processors, at little cost except the raw materials.

Lately, Intel has stirred again and released the Premium range, but unfortunately the price is the most obviously premium about it. Oh, the new processors are better, and they are already selling to people who feel the need for speed, but they seem to be very slow in coming to the mass market. Meanwhile the Open Hardware Foundation has gathered enough patents that they can credibly threaten to build an Octanium clone if Intel tries to discontinue or even reduce the supply below what the market needs. So Intel needs to flood the market with cheap Octanium, or they will create a competitor again, cutting their margins drastically. And this is where RIP comes in.

This technology is inspired by the time-proven disk technology called RAID, Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. At some point, people noticed that you could get more storage by buying two cheap disks than one expensive. More to the point, you could also get faster storage, by writing and reading half of the information at each disk simultaneously. Or you could use it as an automatic backup, or a combination of the above. Well, what do you know: Something similar applies to processors, now that the software is mostly written to take advantage of as many processors as it can get. So we got a Rack of Inexpensive Processors, fittingly called RIP. It could certainly spell Rest in Peace for the Premium range, at least for desktops. Premium Mobile is another matter.

Basically you buy processor power in modules. Each module contains one Octanium processor and optionally some extra memory. If you're on a budget, you can buy the basic model with just one processor and 2 GB of RAM. It should still be enough to run pretty much anything made in the first decade of the century, although some of the later stuff may run slowly. Sims 3 for instance, I have basically the same processor and 4 GB in my Sims 3 machine, and it does not take kindly to large families. Especially not with expansion packs installed. With only 2 GB, it would have to swap to the disk a lot, and run even more slowly. But you could surely surf the Web, listen to music and write a great novel without noticing any slowness. Some games would also run fine if you buy a good graphics card with it.

But the fun begins when you need more power. Instead of throwing away your 6 months old computer and buying a new (which you can't afford anyway), you just buy a processor module. You power down the computer, turn the key and open the side panel (this shuts off the power if you haven't already) and plug the module into the slot marked 2 in the rack inside. When it clicks in place, you close the panel and lock it, then boot your machine. It has now twice the processing power it had five minutes ago. Hey, make that two minutes. And it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. If you needed more memory at the same time, you just bought the Plus module with 2 GB extra RAM on the same small card. This is the type of card that is already in slot 1. I suppose in the future you may be able to replace them with better modules if the rack goes full.

Actually the one I ordered comes with two Plus modules, so it has 16 cores and 4 GB of RAM. This should be enough to run a whole apartment complex of sims for the foreseeable future. Then again the foreseeable future has always been short.