I'd say the desktop CPU situation is doing pretty alright. My 10400F is feeling very modest compared to pretty much everything in the 13xxx and ryzen 7000 lineup. Frustrating given how deadend the chipset I got was.
The Great CPU Stagnation
111–120 of 222 posts
Re: The Great CPU Stagnation
#112What seemingly has stagnated even more is our ability to write fast and responsive software. We have oceans of compute power, blazingly fast I/O, and yet, it's expected and accepted for mundane tasks to take hundreds of milliseconds to complete.
Re: The Great CPU Stagnation
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I understand while these two do contribute a lot to power usage, they don't really contribute that much to heating by themselves? Leakage should happen all the same in a processor that's completely idle and those typically don't heat up much. For higher clock speeds specifically I still don't see how lower resistance isn't key.
> Leakage should happen all the same Modern processors are very careful about this, and actively turn off the supply voltage to large parts of the die to prevent extra leakage current. The funny-but-appropriate name for this is "dark silicon" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_silicon
> at 8 nm technology nodes, the amount of dark silicon may reach up to 50–80%
Damn TIL, I never would've expected that. But I guess it makes sense to use a few of the older, larger transistors that don't leak as much to power off a section of the smaller leaky ones while they're not performing any operations.
Re: The Great CPU Stagnation
#114In fact the CPU stagnation is worse. In contrast to the shrinking chip size and higher frequencies of past scaling laws, CPU core count does not easily translate to performance gains. It needs specialized and careful designed software to tap the capability. In fact if CPU core count did translate more easily to performance gains I think already with the existing CPU's we'd have a fairly signficant one-time boost. May…
> It needs specialized and careful designed software to tap the capability. I've been suggesting engineers get more cores of lower speed to gain insight on what will be performant a few years down the road since I saw my first Xeon Phi. It's been a while since clock speeds got higher (IBM has been pushing 5GHz in their highest end for the past couple years now and it doesn't seem likely they'll cross 6 anytime soon),…
> and the cloud vendors, who'd kill to be able to serve 1% more VMs per kilowatt
If Google's only expense were electricity, and profit margin was 50%, then saving 1% on power bill would increase profits by 1%.
I skimmed the Alphabet annual report: saw $260 revenue, $80 profit, $110 operating expenses (electricity and staff). Say $10 on power, then 1% is $0.1 - improve profits a bit over 0.1%.
Anyone know how many $/year Google spends on power?
Re: The Great CPU Stagnation
#115In fact the CPU stagnation is worse. In contrast to the shrinking chip size and higher frequencies of past scaling laws, CPU core count does not easily translate to performance gains. It needs specialized and careful designed software to tap the capability. In fact if CPU core count did translate more easily to performance gains I think already with the existing CPU's we'd have a fairly signficant one-time boost. May…
Or it needs multiple processes running at the same time. Notably running lots of C++ compilers simultaneously works great and really likes the high core count machines.
Re: The Great CPU Stagnation
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can confirm, I bought a pair of desktops for work in 2012 with Ivy Brige i7's that could "turbo boost" to 3.9 GHz indefinitely without overclock. I did not feel a real upgrade need until the 32 core Threadripper machines came out in 2018.
I only just upgraded from my i5 3570K to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Not because anything I was currently doing with my computer was becoming too slow, but because I wanted to do new things (VR). A shame, I wanted to run that thing into the ground. I've got my old system sat spare, I'm not sure what to do with it.
Nice processor choice... vrchat in mind? Haha
Re: The Great CPU Stagnation
#117We are off the exponential curve until a completely new method is discovered, which of course might not exist.
Maybe our great^n grandchildren will then have lives very similar to the great^n+1 grandchildren thereafter, just like the older days!
Re: The Great CPU Stagnation
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
the one good thing to come out of that era was the "moar cores" meme
heh... https://9gag.com/gag/aRPw3xM
he's wearing a silly hat because it's predated by this https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/tc4aw/make_more_hat...
Re: The Great CPU Stagnation
#119In fact the CPU stagnation is worse. In contrast to the shrinking chip size and higher frequencies of past scaling laws, CPU core count does not easily translate to performance gains. It needs specialized and careful designed software to tap the capability. In fact if CPU core count did translate more easily to performance gains I think already with the existing CPU's we'd have a fairly signficant one-time boost. May…
> CPU core count does not easily translate to performance gains. In theory, performance scales logistically with the number of parallel processors (Amdahl's law). In practice, the limit is (and has always been) memory and i/o. That's why Apple silicon kicks everyone's ass. If we want faster computers, the biggest gains are not to be found in making processors do more work. It's in designing systems (not just CPUs) th…
> In practice, the limit is (and has always been) memory and i/o
Absolutely not. In practise the limit is (1) how many cores are actually _used_ by programs and (2) how much work is put into making anything fast at all, ever. We're using web frontends powered by python backends over a network. The vast majority of programs use nowhere near the resoures available to them.
Re: The Great CPU Stagnation
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like a year - the performance rot runs deep.
Considering that the NeXTStep OS ran on a 1120 × 832, 12 bit, display in 1990 with 12 MB of archaic memory and 1.5 MB of VRAM, I'd say more then a year. Judging by modern app memory usage. Even with the latest and greatest 4k, HDR, wide colour, display, no app should ideally use more then 256 MB of memory by those standards, unless it's even more complex.
Recently watching a Gamer's Nexus video where they tested a new built Voodoo 6 5000, I was impressed watching them install some ancient edition of Windows in which to do the testing, and how snappy and responsive the interface was.