The Great CPU Stagnation

Post by ilyt » Thu, May 18, 2023, 10:38 PM UTC

amiga-workbench wrote: post #97

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #95

Earlier 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.

Post by ilyt » Thu, May 18, 2023, 10:40 PM UTC

didgetmaster wrote: post #129

lynx23 wrote: post #44

The perfect time to shed ourselves of the idea that "optimisation is a waste of dev-time". Mobile computing was the last godsent t actually rethink performance a little bit, but we still have a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit. I sometimes dream about a month-of-no-new-features, where everyone would just have a bit of time to clean up and improve on existing stuff.

It would be nice if every developer had to run their latest build on 10 year old hardware while testing it out. Instead of their high-powered development machine with the latest CPU, tons of high speed memory, and the fastest SSD; they would get to experience what many of their customers have to endure on slower hardware with capacity constraints. Nothing spurs optimization like seeing first hand how your code creeps…

Post by cubefox » Thu, May 18, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

tedsanders wrote: post #131

crabbone wrote: post #81

There were multiple mentions in this thread contrasting GPU with CPU... I think, there's some conceptual gap here. GPUs are made of the same thing as CPUs, they have all the same problems CPUs have. They emphasize vectorized operations, and some less important (for this thread) stuff, like video encoding / decoding, but, by and large, the "PU" part is not accidentally the same in both acronyms. The difference comes f…

Indeed, GPUs are not much better. For example, the NVIDIA H100 SXM has roughly the same price per transistor as the A100 SXM. The gains between generations were roughly equally split between (1) better chip design, (2) higher clock speed / power consumption, and (3) more transistors. Cost per transistor did not meaningfully improve.

Post by cubefox » Thu, May 18, 2023, 11:07 PM UTC

formerly_proven wrote: post #29

> Regrettably, when considering cost per core, this impressive trend appears to have stalled, ushering in an era of CPU stagnation. In this case, don't let the author see $/GFLOPS for the last 10 years of GPUs!

Post by fsckboy » Thu, May 18, 2023, 11:25 PM UTC

cl0ckt0wer wrote: post #22

The cores/money comparison doesn't looks like it accounts for inflation.