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Will 1 sec 1 Million Super Pi ever be achieved?

Frank_Rizzo

Frank_Rizzo

Frank_Rizzo

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The CPUs I have had over the years have hit 1M SuperPi times of 40s, 30s, 20s and this week just under 8s.

This got me thinking. Will there ever be a 1 second time for 1M SuperPi?

Based on pure clock speed it looks very much unlikely. The 40/30/20 figures were obtained from 2Ghz/3Ghz/3.8Ghz clock speeds. This sub 8s figure is from a 2500K running at 4.8Ghz

It is now getting so much harder to double clock speed and thus halve SuperPi time. In order to get 1s from 8s the time has to be halved, halved, and halved again. This would mean that the 4.8Ghz speed would have to be doubled, doubled, and doubled again = 38.4Ghz :D

As SuperPi is single thread, and the clock speed is the biggest determining factor then it does seem that 1 second will never be achieved. At best 5 or possibly 4+ seconds will be world record holders forever.

This is the same as the world record for 100 metres. It will get to a point where humans will no longer physically run any faster, and thus the world record may never be beat (unless the times are started to be recored in .00001 seconds)
 
Uh for SuperPi clock speed is everything. Single thread.

If clock speeds physically hit a limit of 5/6/7Ghz then I can not see how SuperPi could ever break 4/5 seconds.
 
Oh, i get it, so it will be program restricted.

That sucks, if thats the case how is it useful as a benchmarking program as that is how I have seen it used.

But even single thread the processing power still increases with each jump forward (q6600 vs sandybridge), plus we dont know what architecture is round the corner. So I still think yes.
 
Frank_Rizzo said:
Uh for SuperPi clock speed is everything. Single thread.

If clock speeds physically hit a limit of 5/6/7Ghz then I can not see how SuperPi could ever break 4/5 seconds.
Click to expand...

Not entirely true as the amount of work done per clock cycle plays a part too, you won't see a 3GHz Pentium D beating a 2.8GHz C2D for instance.
 
im not sure how relevant super pi is these days. It's interesting to know y-cruncher can calculate 50 million digits faster than superPI can can calculate 1 million on the same cpu (phenom2-965 at stock)

Validation Version: 1.1

Program: y-cruncher - Gamma to the eXtReMe!!! ( www.numberworld.org )
Copyright 2008-2011 Alexander J. Yee ( [email protected] )


User: None Specified - You can edit this in "Username.txt".


Processor(s): AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 Processor
Logical Cores: 4
Physical Memory: 4,293,058,560 bytes ( 4.00 GB )
CPU Frequency: 3,411,630,543 Hz

Program Version: 0.5.5 Build 9178 Alpha (x64 SSE3 - Windows ~ Kasumi)
Constant: Pi
Algorithm: Chudnovsky Formula
Decimal Digits: 100,000,000
Hexadecimal Digits: Disabled
Threading Mode: 4 threads
Computation Mode: Ram Only
Swap Disks: 0
Working Memory: 536 MB

Start Date: Mon Feb 14 11:57:49 2011
End Date: Mon Feb 14 11:58:40 2011

Computation Time: 48.331 seconds
Total Time: 51.429 seconds

CPU Utilization: 377.12 %
Multi-core Efficiency: 94.28 %

Last Digits:
9948682556 3967530560 3352869667 7734610718 4471868529 : 99,999,950
7572203175 2074898161 1683139375 1497058112 0187751592 : 100,000,000

Timer Sanity Check: Passed
Frequency Sanity Check: Passed
ECC Recovered Errors: 0
Checkpoint From: None

----

Checksum: 43bd4fe66fdd58711699abc29c81e3a4773c3132dc621ed00e026ab76d56cddd
Click to expand...
 
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Cache size important too and this has helped figures over the years.

IMO 1 second will never be achieved with current home use technology. 10GHz+ surely can't be achieved and no new chipset, increase in RAM bandwidth and decrease in latencies will be sufficient enough to achieve 1 second.

Yes there are other ways of calculating pi figues. And SuperPi is now probably as irrelevant as achieving the highest score on Donkey Kong, whilst everyone else is amassing points in some MMO.

But just for the record. I'm sure there will be a world record set for SuperPi of around 4+ seconds and it will never be beat. That's the challenge ...
 
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Frank_Rizzo said:
Yes there are other ways of calculating pi figues. And SuperPi is now probably as irrelevant as achieving the highest score on Donkey Kong, whilst everyone else is amassing points in some MMO.
Click to expand...


that wasnt my point. SuperPI was always used a performance benchmark but i dont think it's relevant any more. At least with y-cruncher its about how fast we can calculate Pi. SuperPI is neither the fastest method of calculation, nor is it indicative of modern-day cpu performance. I'm left wondering why we still hold on to it - you dont see people benching 3dmark 2003 anymore, for example.
 
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There will NEVER become a point that Technology stops.

Back in the P3 450 days the magazines were saying that we wont be able to get above 1Ghz. The technology simply doesnt exist.

Well it does now. And the same will happen in the future.
 
So it may be possible to get 38Ghz and thus 1 second in about ... 15-20 years?

I'm still not convinced. The speed barrier seems to be the biggest hold back at the moment. In the 80's and 90's it was easy to double processor speeds from 16Mhz to 33Mz .. 100Mhz, 200Mhz, 400Mhz. It sort of followed Moore's Law.

But in the past 5 or so years clock speed has been harder to increase and thus multi cores, bigger caches are used for performance gains. Thus with current architecture I don't think there will ever be stock speeds of 10Ghz, let alone the 30Ghz+ which would need to be required for 1M SuperPi.

It's like when the first jet engines were trialled. The sound barrier was a restriction. Of course, mach X speeds were achieved later once restrictions were overcome but it was decades later that it was available for commercial use.

1 second may be possible in 20 years but it would be a totally different architecture to todays technology. Maybe silicon has had it's days.
 
Your forgetting the fact that a 1ghz pentium 3 will run significantly slower than a 1ghz Sandy bridge cpu, its not just clock speed increase that will improve times, memory latencies are architectural improvements also bring performance increases.
 
It'll get broken in a couple of generations, maybe three, but no more.

As others have mentioned more efficient methods of using each clock have continued to be found. Pentium 3 was actually more efficient than Pentium 4 clock for clock which is why, when Intel found there were physical problems getting processors to run much faster than 4ghz (rather than the 10+Ghz they thought would eventually be achievable using P4), they switched back to framework with a more efficient architecture.

Core 2 took that to a new level, then i3/5/7 beat that.

In 2 Generations I think we will see sub 1 second times when the L2N crowd get hold of those new parts. Then it'll be another generation before we start seeing people do it on Water or Air.
 
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