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The Great CPU Stagnation

databasearchitects.blogspot.com

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Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#151

Post by NovaDudely »

dietrichepp wrote: post #92
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.

A more extreme version of that is “permacomputing”— https://permacomputing.net/projects/ I still regularly use old systems for fun. I grew up with Macs, so that’s the point of reference. When I use these old systems, I pine for a few specific things I’m used to on newer systems—but it almost feels like nitpicking. The things that I really want from a computer are pretty basic. Like good, consistent copy/paste and dra…

I am always more than happy to see Permacomputing mentioned. I really think it is a wave of the future that will not be fully realized for another decade or so. Similar to Solar punk, it is still trying to find its feet and a lot of the most optimistic propositions will look silly in retrospect but the potential is there.

It also kind of drives me up the wall when you see what was being done on computers in the 80's and 90's on sub 100Mhz processors and realizing just how much efficiency has been lost in the name of ease. Excel shouldn't need to use all 12 threads of my CPU and visibly take time to sort less than a 1MB of data but here we are.

I have been working on an essay regarding Permacomputing for the last few weeks and it can be kind of difficult to summarize at times. The closest I can get is that it is part retrospective about want worked in the past but with the direct goal of implementing the goals long term sustainable systems that do not require large external inputs.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#152

Post by NovaDudely »

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.

There is that moment in video game development when the feature set is locked down and it basically turns into speed and stability optimization. Some people love it, others hate it.

I guess you would get a similar state in some embedded systems. The folks at NASA working on the Mars Rovers have a set target and are usually targeting mid 90's MIPS or PPC processor so they have to be fixated on speed and performance.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#154

Post by AgentOrange1234 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #123
orbital-decay wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clockless designs did find their use, just not for the entire chips. Certain parts of modern CPUs are asynchronous.

Yeah, I'm just a bit surprised it didn't go further. Do you know what the reasons were that they couldn't make the entire thing clockless?

It makes reasoning about behavior very, very difficult. There is no tooling support for it.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#155

Post by WaxProlix »

ilyt wrote: post #141
amiga-workbench wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

my i7-4790 served me nicely for 8 years. Only upgraded because now most games were CPU-limited, even on "only" GTX 1070. But I went "all in" "I don't want to upgrade for quite a long time" with 7800X3D. Maybe GPU upgrade in 2-3 years...

Did something similar a bit ago with the 5900X and a 6900XT. Wonderful setup, low wattage, quiet, performant.

Just lost it to a fire and not sure what to replace it with, alas. Too busy in the aftermath to justify building and parting stuff independently, so that probably leaves me with an off the shelf or a workstation + GPU combo.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#156

Post by Animats »

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.

> GPU power is skyrocketing

Not quite. NVidia's entry level price/performance has not improved much since 2016. What's skyrocketing is the price of the top of the line models.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#157

Post by nyanpasu64 »

ilyt wrote: post #141
amiga-workbench wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

my i7-4790 served me nicely for 8 years. Only upgraded because now most games were CPU-limited, even on "only" GTX 1070. But I went "all in" "I don't want to upgrade for quite a long time" with 7800X3D. Maybe GPU upgrade in 2-3 years...

Have you seen the recent Gamers Nexus videos on CPU overvolting and catching on fire? You should update your BIOS to prevent potential further damage.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#158

Post by NovaDudely »

RajT88 wrote: post #99
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.

OS and device manufacturers don't necessarily want to optimize. Optimization would reduce the hardware replacement cycle, cutting into their profits. Microsoft gets pressure from their hardware partners to keep up the hardware replacement cycle, and they themselves of course get a cut of that via OS licenses. Phone manufacturers seemingly invented "Always On Displays" to also cause people to start to think they neede…

I suspect this is why companies like MS are locking down OS releases to specific hardware in the name of security. Apple moving to Apple Silicon also means they can potentially lock down the hardware as they see fit.

Upgrades will be forced via software obsolescence rather than hardware performance.

This is why I think the Linux/Free-Libre software folks would do well to focus a bit more on optimizing performance as there is a lot of room for improvement that will not need to be forced onto people.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#159

Post by infinite8s »

danielvaughn wrote: post #139
MichaelZuo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We might need to block all software features for the next decade so we can figure out what's going on.

The C memory model underlying all modern processors does not scale. Most of the time your cpu is sitting idle.

Re: The Great CPU Stagnation

#160

Post by infinite8s »

orbital-decay wrote: post #89
vlovich123 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think two major revolutions would be optical and reversible computing. The former would significantly shrink the heat generated which is a huge bottleneck but is very hard to build generic computing out of and expensive. The latter would basically result in computing obtaining a new theoretical lower bound on energy required but is purely research with no known approaches for actually building the things. Asynchron…

Clockless designs did find their use, just not for the entire chips. Certain parts of modern CPUs are asynchronous.

What parts are clockless?
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