Warning, this idea came into existence at 2am, If this does not make sense to you, wait untill 2am and try reading it again.

1. Improvements in fabrication techniques
2. The Creation of more complex microprocessor architectures

• When the 8086 was first released in 1978, it was constructed of only 29,000 transistors.
• The Pentium 4 contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 42,000,000 transistors
• The P4 utilizes 1,448 times the transistors of the 8086
• Admitedly, the P4 is increadably more advanced that the 8086
• Better to compare would be the origional Pentium, with 3,100,000 transistors
• The P4 has approximatly 14 times the transistor count.

I ask now, If we were to produce an origional pentium with todays latest fabrication technologies, How well would it perform? I am sure that it will not be as powerfull, as a P4, however it will be approximatly 1/14th the cost. Could a Pentium running 3 GHz possibly perform less than 1/14th of a P4?

I think it would be interesting to look into the using modern fabrication processes to build 14 pentiums, (or other simularly 'primative' processors into the form of a single chip, the same size as a modern P4 at an equivilant clock speed.

While each processor core will not be advance, or perform any where close to the of the P4, I beleive that this configuration may better aid multithreaded applications.

Great care will have to be taken in designing the memory interfaces between processor cores and the controlling operating system must make wise decisions with reguard to process affinity, to avoid deadlocking the many simaltaniously running threads. I think that it would be a pretty cool project.

Ohh yea and the name... Intel has hyper-Threading, This is Super-Threading

More info

refrences:

• Moore's Law