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PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

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Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#11

Post by layer8 »

Sharlin wrote: post #5

The i486DX 33MHz was introduced in May 1990. A 30x increase, or about five doublings, in clock speeds over ten years. That's of course not the whole truth; the Athlon could do much more in one cycle than the 486. In any case, in 2010 we clearly did not have 30GHz processors – by then, the era of exponentially rising clock speeds was very decidedly over. I bought an original quadcore i7 in 2009 and used it for the nex…

On the plus side, the 486DX-33 didn’t require active cooling. The second half of the 1990s was when home computing started to become noisy, and the art of trying to build silent PCs began.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#12

Post by rckclmbr »

dd_xplore wrote: post #3

I remember back in 2006 I used to browse overclock forums to overclock my pentium 4, I tons of fun consuming lots of instructions, I learned the bios, changed PLL clocks, mem clocks etc.

I bought a car radiator and dremeled out my case, visited Home Depot for all the tubes and connectors. It’s too easy nowadays to add watercooling

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#13

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

mtucker502 wrote: post #2

What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?

What would be the benefit? You don't need a 10GHz processor to browse the web, or edit a spreadsheet, and in any case things like that are already multi-threaded.

The current direction of adding more cores makes more sense, since this is really what CPU intensive programs generally need - more parallelism.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#14

Post by brennanpeterson »

mtucker502 wrote: post #2

What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?

None for normal.compute, since energy density is still fundamental. But the interesting option is cryogenic computing, which can have zero switching energy, and 10s of GHz clock rates

Some neat startups to watch for in this space.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#15

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Argh. The headline. The opener. Awful. Where are editors in 2026? There's no way an LLM would write this.

The GHz barrier wasn't special. What was much more important was the fact that AMD was giving Intel a hard time and there was finally hard competition.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#16

Post by sigmoid10 »

HPsquared wrote: post #8
xnx wrote: post #7

The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.

SSDs were such a revolution though, and a really rewarding upgrade. I'd fit SSDs to friend and family computers as an upgrade.

I once had a decade old Thinkpad that suddenly became my new work laptop once more thanks to an SSD. It's a true shame they simply don't make them like this anymore.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#17

Post by adrian_b »

vessenes wrote: post #10
mtucker502 wrote: post #2

What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?

Like any doubling rule, the buck has to stop somewhere. Higher energy usage + smaller geometry means much more exotic analog physics to worry about in chips. I’m not a silicon engineer by any means but I’d expect 10Ghz cycles will be optical or very exotically cooled or not coming at us at all.

Reaching 10 GHz for a CPU will never be done in silicon.

It could be done if either silicon will be replaced with another semiconductor or semiconductors will be replaced with something else for making logical gates, e.g. with organic molecules, to be able to design a logical gate atom by atom.

For the first variant, i.e. replacing silicon with another semiconductor, research is fairly advanced, but this would increase the fabrication cost so it will be done only when any methods for further improvements of silicon integrated circuits will become ineffective or too expensive, which is unlikely to happen earlier than a decade from now.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#18

Post by st_goliath »

xnx wrote: post #7

The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.

> The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time.

About a week ago, completely out of the blue, YouTube recommended this old gem to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jQZxH7NgM

A Pentium 4, overclocked to 5GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling.

Watching this was such an amazing throwback. I remember clearly the last time I saw it, which was when an excited friend showed it to me on a PC at our schools library. A year or so before YouTube even existed.

By 2005, my Pentium 4 Prescott at home had some 3.6GHz without overclocking, 4GHz models for the consumer market were already announced (but plagued by delays), but surely 10GHz was "just a few more years away".

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#19

Post by micv »

HPsquared wrote: post #8
xnx wrote: post #7

The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.

SSDs were such a revolution though, and a really rewarding upgrade. I'd fit SSDs to friend and family computers as an upgrade.

Getting my first SSD was absolutely the best computer upgrade I've ever bought. I didn't even realise how annoying load times were because I was so used to them and coming from C64s and Amigas even spinning rust seemed fairly quick.

It took a long time before I felt a need to improve my PC's performance again after that.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#20

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #15

Argh. The headline. The opener. Awful. Where are editors in 2026? There's no way an LLM would write this. The GHz barrier wasn't special. What was much more important was the fact that AMD was giving Intel a hard time and there was finally hard competition.

There was a time where increased clock speeds, or more generally increased processor throughput was important. I can remember when computers were slow, even for things like browsing the web (and not just because internet connection speeds were slow), and paying more for a new faster computer made sense. I think this time period may well have lasted roughly until the "GHz era" or thereabouts, after which even the cheapest, slowest, computers were all that anybody really needed, except for gamers where the the solution was a faster graphics card (which eventually lead to GPU-computing and the current AI revolution!)
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