I know they talked about it somewhat a few years ago when it was new, but a show on Yubikey would be interesting.
Huh, I can actually point on a map to exactly where I was and what I was doing when listening to that episode. I was walking down Cardigan road in Headingly, toward the co-op, doing the weekly shopping.
If you're stuck for Monday ideas, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the concept of dark silicon, and what it might mean in the future.
By dark silicon I mean like the new iPhone processors that have four cores, but only two of them are ever on at a time, meaning there are more options for power saving vs processing power vs heat management.
"Pause to consider: it means that in the near future, you will buy a computer made of circuits that remain mostly inactive most of the time. In fact, we might imagine a law of the sort…
The percentage of dark circuits will double every two years in commodity computers.
That sounds a bit crazy. This means that one day, we might use only 1% of the circuits in your processors at any one time—not unlike our brain. "
"Programming might start to sound a lot like biology."
Current 2008-onward chips will run at higher clock speeds when fewer cores are engaged, but lower them when all cores are taxed. As far as I know, heat and power consumption are the primary reasons for this.
1. Clock speed. 2. How much of the silicon is being used. 3. Time spent processing vs time spent idle.
Anyway, that blog post I linked to concluded that because data I/O is the most energy intensive part of using chips, more and more energy savings will come from putting in more and ore silicon that can retain its state between long stretches of not being used, much like the human brain.
As the transistors stop shrinking, this means that the energy usage of RAM per byte will plateau. Hence, the energy usage due to memory will start growing exponentially, assuming that the amount of memory in systems grows exponentially.
What? That also implies computers growing exponentially in size. That seems... improbable.
Given how much of my case is empty space, that might be feasible, at least in the short term. I'm pretty sure cell phones are already growing exponentially.
Historically, chip density was growing exponentially but is about to hit an atomic wall. Chip sizes are also shrinking, which makes for faster chips (the speed of electricity is limited by the speed of light, shorter distances across a smaller chip) and heat dissipation.
Anyway, that blog post I linked to concluded that because data I/O is the most energy intensive part of using chips, more and more energy savings will come from putting in more and ore silicon that can retain its state between long stretches of not being used, much like the human brain.
The quote suggests "often account for half of the energy usage". The reason we "store" anything at all in the chip is that the chip's caches are the only place fast enough—by orders of magnitude—for the chip to operate at its highest speeds. They're also relatively tiny given the RAM in computers and phones; check out the L1, L2, and L3 cache sizes for Intel CPUs and Apple A10. Data doesn't stay there for very long unless the chip is working on a very CPU efficient problem.
The push has been to parallel computing to maintain overall effective speed improvements. For energy efficiency in these parallel environments, you get Lemire's “dark silicon”. Considering that your desktop/notebook is at 1% CPU usage 99% of the time, why wouldn't you have most of the silicon go dark if you could? This is exactly what the Apple A10 does: two energy efficient cores that stay mostly on and two high performance cores that are turned on as needed.
Comments
The bottom, but it's there. I know OF it.
By dark silicon I mean like the new iPhone processors that have four cores, but only two of them are ever on at a time, meaning there are more options for power saving vs processing power vs heat management.
http://lemire.me/blog/2016/09/19/the-rise-of-dark-circuits/
"Pause to consider: it means that in the near future, you will buy a computer made of circuits that remain mostly inactive most of the time. In fact, we might imagine a law of the sort…
The percentage of dark circuits will double every two years in commodity computers.
That sounds a bit crazy. This means that one day, we might use only 1% of the circuits in your processors at any one time—not unlike our brain. "
"Programming might start to sound a lot like biology."
1. Clock speed.
2. How much of the silicon is being used.
3. Time spent processing vs time spent idle.
Anyway, that blog post I linked to concluded that because data I/O is the most energy intensive part of using chips, more and more energy savings will come from putting in more and ore silicon that can retain its state between long stretches of not being used, much like the human brain.
The push has been to parallel computing to maintain overall effective speed improvements. For energy efficiency in these parallel environments, you get Lemire's “dark silicon”. Considering that your desktop/notebook is at 1% CPU usage 99% of the time, why wouldn't you have most of the silicon go dark if you could? This is exactly what the Apple A10 does: two energy efficient cores that stay mostly on and two high performance cores that are turned on as needed.
Anyway, just finished the first Malazan book. Onto the second.
I think this would make an excellent panel.
Then D&D like board games. Ravenloft/Decent
And wrap up with RPG video games.