Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Geek Speak => Topic started by: CliffordK on 01/03/2014 01:57:55
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Looking at the electronic currency mining, they seem to be migrating from CPU intense processing to essentially graphic cards and perhaps massively parallel small processor systems.
Intel and AMD have been producing 3 to 4 GHz CPUs for nearly a decade now. Granted one may be able to squeeze 6 to 12 "cores" into a home PC with loads of Cache.
However, 1 to 3 THz (TFlop) rated "mining" systems are now coming out for less than $10K. That means that the processing speed is on the order of 1000 times as fast as the typical Intel/AMD system. Could one run them as a personal super-computer?
The early SUN SPARCs, and a number of other "workstations" used to run what was called RISC, or "Reduced Instruction Set Computing" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_computing), which I think is compatible with some of the Unix/Linux systems.
I'm not convinced that I truly need a TFlop to read my e-mail, but perhaps it would be useful for a DB/Web server, modeling and simulations, or wicked real-time graphics (assuming also given graphic connections).
Will there be an effort to bring this technology back into workstations? Will it be able to compete with the Intel/AMD CPU based systems?
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I think, Clifford, that the ARM chips - which power the processing in the majority of the world's mobile devices - are all RISC architecture are they not?