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Will 1 sec 1 Million Super Pi ever be achieved?

And skimming threads without reading all of the information is such a simple taks that I am astonished some people do it.

SuperPi is single thread. The biggest influence on the performance of the app is the clock speed. The higher the clock speed the better the results. Adding 4, 8, 12 cores, increasing the cache by a Meg or so, increasing memory bandwidth will hardly make any impact on the results.

Look at the results on the hwbot site. There is a very strong correlation between performance and clock speed.
 
There used to be a joke i think in the sixties that one day you'll be able to buy a computer in a box. I think the future will be the same, in that what we have now is laughable compared to whats possible.

Quantum computers are in development, some people reckon they will be able to break the strongest encryption in use today in seconds rather than tens of thousands of years.

JJ
 
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super-pi is pointless, thats pretty much it to be honest. whats the point in todays world of a so called 'benchmark' program being single threaded? it won't happen unless its made to be multi-threaded, since that is the obvious direction things are heading, to use super-pi as an actual benchmark of a CPUs performance isn't relevant anymore, since the number of cores is growing, core size is shrinking. its all heading in the direction of efficiency over outright power, better multi-threaded performance is the 'real' benchmark IMO, anything else is pointless. :confused: like trying to clock the speed of a cat with one leg or something, you just don't do it!
 
What's the point in continuing to conquer Everest?
What's the point in testing the new Focus over 0-62?
What's the point in continuing the Paris to Dakar Rally?
What's the point in benching rigs with SuperPi?

It's a challenge to be taken on.

My OP point is that I don't think 1 second will ever be achievable. This is much in the same way that no human with current body (chipset) and mindset (processor) will ever break the 3 minute mile, as there has to be a point where current physicality (technology) can no longer achieve a record.

I think that a 4 second 1M SuperPi will be the fastest ever and not ever beaten. If 4s is achieved it will be by silicon on something which would run at around 8-9Ghz, possibly in 2012/13 and that is it.

Technology always improves but it would need a sea-change in structure to be able to break the 1s 1M SuperPi barrier. A pointless exercise maybe. But for users which require pure grunt performance, rather than multiple processes handling all things at once, it is important.
 
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Ok, I have one for you. You can run a snes emulator to run a snes game on the PC 100 of times faster than you could on the original hardware.

What if a few generations of processor down the line you emulate a "single core pc" on the however many core wierd new architecture pc of the future. You could emulate a 100gz processor (effectivley letting the multiple cores power the emulation of a single core pc), just the same way you can emulate a 21mhz Snes now.
 
KelDG said:
Ok, I have one for you. You can run a snes emulator to run a snes game on the PC 100 of times faster than you could on the original hardware.

What if a few generations of processor down the line you emulate a "single core pc" on the however many core wierd new architecture pc of the future. You could emulate a 100gz processor (effectivley letting the multiple cores power the emulation of a single core pc), just the same way you can emulate a 21mhz Snes now.
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in the future, where programs will be more efficiently threaded, etc. why would you want to have a multi-core processor act as a single core processor, surely that would defeat the purpose of progression? also what is the point in running a game a hundred times faster than it originally ran, if it originally ran totally fine in the first place? think about it this way, supreme commander, which is pretty good use of multiple cores will significantly faster (especially in very large scale battles, etc.) on a Phenom II X6 than it would on a 4GHZ C2D, however willing to say the C2D would annihilate the Phenom in Super-PI, so at the end of the day does it really give an accurate representation of performance, and if not where is its validity as a benchmark tool, don't get me wrong in the past it was perfect but i feel technology and the market are moving away from that kind of application. :)

also Frank_Rizzo i get what your saying, i really do but at the end of the day for me the market is heading in one direction, efficiency and that for the most part means handling tasks more efficiently. would prefer my quad-core to be using as much of its resources as possible as often as possible rather than being 'really' fast in a situation that effectively wastes 75% of its 'potential' performance, but not utilizing the three other cores, so just because a 2.4GHZ Q6600 scores lower in Super-PI than a 3GHZ E6600 for example, does it mean that its less powerful, in the overall scheme of things no, just inefficiently utilized. guess we'll have to just agree to disagree on this one. ;) but if i had to answer, would guess graphene based processors could break the 1s mark due to sheer clock speed, however i don't think any future graphene processor will be geared toward single-threaded applications.
 
Frank_Rizzo said:
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)
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records are broken on a daily basis. lets take your 100m sprint for example. as medicine and genetics advance so will steroids and humans , i expect to see the 100m time broken several times within my life time. technology will always advance and so will humans. there are also different types of cpu's , i'd like to see a ps3 or a gpu run this test. it will be doable within 1 second, you have proved this yorself by stating how your times have dropped significantly within a short space of time, it may take 5 years or 10 but it will happen
 
Gashman said:
in the future, where programs will be more efficiently threaded, etc. why would you want to have a multi-core processor act as a single core processor, surely that would defeat the purpose of progression? also what is the point in running a game a hundred times faster than it originally ran, if it originally ran totally fine in the first place? think about it this way, supreme commander, which is pretty good use of multiple cores will significantly faster (especially in very large scale battles, etc.) on a Phenom II X6 than it would on a 4GHZ C2D, however willing to say the C2D would annihilate the Phenom in Super-PI, so at the end of the day does it really give an accurate representation of performance, and if not where is its validity as a benchmark tool, don't get me wrong in the past it was perfect but i feel technology and the market are moving away from that kind of application. :)
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Sorry, you misunderstand me. I don't think there is any point in SuperPI, but this is a discussion on how to get SuperPI running faster than 1 second, it was just an idea on how to do that. Basically a way to run a single thread by using all the cores of a future PC by emulating a single core PC. To be fair this is a long way round sidestepping the fact that it probably would be easier to re-wright SuperPI to use multiple threads, but that isn't the point of this thread.
 
I'm surprised so many people doubt that more efficient CPU design will make up for the finite nature of Silicone.

It's not a matter of cache or threads or cores, it's a matter of how many clock cycles it takes to perform an action. For example Netburst needed (for the sake of arguement) say 16 cycles to perform an calculation. Pentium III needed only 12. AMD64 needed 10. Core2 needed 8. i3/5/7 needs 7 and within a few years the next generation will need come out that will be able to get more work done per clock cycle again.

SuperPi 1M will be done in under a second, and within 3-4 generations it'll be achievable with a CPU at only 3-4 Ghz. That's 10 years from now, but i suspect the hardcore crowd will get there in about half that time.
 
why the hell isn't Super-PI mult-threaded anyways? surely if you want to calculate PI as quickly as possible, one should use all resources to accomplish that goal, or further render the exercise pointless! :confused: weird that my Q6600 beats my mates i7, even though in more or less 100% of real world applications the i7 trounces the Q6600! :D
 
man_from_uncle said:
... SuperPi 1M will be done in under a second, and within 3-4 generations it'll be achievable with a CPU at only 3-4 Ghz. That's 10 years from now, but i suspect the hardcore crowd will get there in about half that time.
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My Old Pentium 4 (Stock) @ 3.4Ghz Done SuperPi 1M at 40ish Seconds. My new i7 2600k at stock @ 3.4Ghz does it in 10-12? not 100%. But The Fact Stands. the new cores are 200% Faster Clock for Clock. (As this benchmark only compares one core).
 
Frank_Rizzo said:
SuperPi is single thread. The biggest influence on the performance of the app is the clock speed. The higher the clock speed the better the results. Adding 4, 8, 12 cores, increasing the cache by a Meg or so, increasing memory bandwidth will hardly make any impact on the results.
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Increasing the number of transistors on the processor allows more instructions per clock, you do not need to increase clock speed to significantly increase performance. A 4GHz p4 will be easily outperformed by a 3GHz i7.
 
Single threaded performance IS important, because if you have a main thread handling something heavy (like AI calculations and movement), then the faster the performance, the faster your game will run. This is pretty obvious, especially if you have other threads dedicated to weather, physics, and PC/NPC locations, etc. The faster the thread performance, the faster the game will run. Otherwise, you can make an absurd claim that (given the same IPC overall), that having 4 threads running at 4 ghz is far worse than having 160 threads running at 100 mhz.

It's far, far less efficient to have 40 100 mhz threads handling AI calculations, than to have one thread at 4 ghz doing it.

Anyway, especially with news about that 100 ghz Graphine(?) transistor, of course 1sec superpi will be broken eventually. It's just a matter of when.
I think a better question would have been if 1sec 1M would ever be broken on contemporary *silicon* transistors or not. And that, I would say is a resounding "no", because we're already getting close to the physical limits of that technology, anyway, why is why the Mhz race virtually ended, and parallel processing took off.

Once a breakthrough in transistor tech occurs, the ghz wars will heat up again...
 
Single threaded performance is indeed very important if not more important than multithreaded performance. I'd rather have 1x8GHz than 4x4GHz any day.
 
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Br4d said:
My Old Pentium 4 (Stock) @ 3.4Ghz Done SuperPi 1M at 40ish Seconds. My new i7 2600k at stock @ 3.4Ghz does it in 10-12? not 100%. But The Fact Stands. the new cores are 200% Faster Clock for Clock. (As this benchmark only compares one core).
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I think that makes my maths about right. 70+% more efficient after 2 generations. Another two generations will bring that time down to 3 secs or so, then another 2 to bring it down to 1 sec.

And of course the hardcore crowd will pip it under 1 sec probably a generation earlier.
 
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