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The Great CPU Stagnation

databasearchitects.blogspot.com

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Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#11

Post by f6v »

freedomben wrote: post #8
AbsoluteCabbage wrote: post #3

At least now people will start to focus on how bloated and slow software has become in the meantime. And stop referring to it as “tech”.

I (unfortunately) doubt it. I think the reality with our current situation is that only hobbyists and open source people care enough about that to do anything about it. Everyone else is doing Scrum so hard that they can't think of much outside the current sprint, and any "pre-mature optimization" is evil and must be avoided. The result will be more of the same bloat. Competition won't help because everybody is using…

> Everyone else is doing Scrum so hard that they can't think of much outside the current sprint

This is a gross oversimplification. While there’re inefficiencies and process abuses, this doesn’t mean nobody cares about speed and resources. It might look that way to purists who’re focused only on tech part of the businesses.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#12

Post by moffkalast »

kayson wrote: post #2

We've known about this for a long time. Everyone expected it to happen. There are some key upcoming technologies that have the potential to cause a step in scaling (CFETs, backside power delivery) but it's still not going to be anywhere near Moore's law levels. I think this is part of why GPU power is skyrocketing and why Apple, Qualcomm, and the like are trying to shift towards services.

Well the main problem is resistance isn't it? Most of the power "used" is to get electrons to flow fast enough for the logic gates to settle for a specific clock frequency and the resistive losses to heat.

The only real way forward that isn't a temporary workaround seems finding a new type of semiconductor that has lower overall resistance than silicon. Whoever figures out how to dope graphene and produce wafers without defects will probably make trillions.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#16

Post by mhh__ »

AbsoluteCabbage wrote: post #3

At least now people will start to focus on how bloated and slow software has become in the meantime. And stop referring to it as “tech”.

Processors used to spend most of their time sorting, after a period of wasteful bullshit they may return to hotspot's dominating again in the form of AI inference.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#19

Post by jvanderbot »

freedomben wrote: post #8
AbsoluteCabbage wrote: post #3

At least now people will start to focus on how bloated and slow software has become in the meantime. And stop referring to it as “tech”.

I (unfortunately) doubt it. I think the reality with our current situation is that only hobbyists and open source people care enough about that to do anything about it. Everyone else is doing Scrum so hard that they can't think of much outside the current sprint, and any "pre-mature optimization" is evil and must be avoided. The result will be more of the same bloat. Competition won't help because everybody is using…

That's exponential era practices. But we're hitting the top of the S curve. Believing that exponential era practices will continue indefinitely into the coming linear/level era is as naive as believing exponential growth continues forever.

The real question is what happens first: change in software to adapt to slow growing compute or change in architecture to revitalize Moore's law.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#20

Post by moffkalast »

mhh__ wrote: post #16
AbsoluteCabbage wrote: post #3

At least now people will start to focus on how bloated and slow software has become in the meantime. And stop referring to it as “tech”.

Processors used to spend most of their time sorting, after a period of wasteful bullshit they may return to hotspot's dominating again in the form of AI inference.

Won't we have dedicated analog/optical/whatever inference accelerators by that point as well?
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