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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

#21

Post by embedding-shape »

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.

> Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.

"Bananas" core-counts gave me the same experience. Some year ago I moved to Ryzen Threadripper and experienced similar "Wow, compiling this project is now 4x faster" or "processing this TBs of data is now 8x faster", but of course it's very specific to specific workloads where concurrency and parallism is thought of from the ground up, not a general 2x speed up in everything.

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

#22

Post by geon »

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.

GPUs for 3d graphics were a game changer.

I can see why you wouldn’t consider it as impactful if you weren’t into gaming at the time.

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

#23

Post by adrian_b »

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.

In terms of marketing, the "GHz" barrier was special, because surpassing it has indeed created a lot of recognition in the general public for the fact that the AMD Athlon CPUs were better than the Intel Pentium III CPUs.

In reality, of course what you say is true and the fact that Athlon could previde a few extra hundreds of MHz in the clock frequency was not decisive.

Athlon had many improvements in microarchitecture in comparison with Pentium III, which ensured a much better performance even at equal clock frequency. For instance, Athlon was the first x86 CPU that was able to do both a floating-point multiplication and a floating-point addition in a single clock cycle. Pentium III, like all previous Intel Pentium CPUs required 2 clock cycles for this pair of operations.

This much better floating-point performance of Athlon vs. Intel contrasted with the previous generation, where AMD K6 had competitive integer performance with Intel, but its floating-point performance was well below that of the various Intel Pentium models (which had hurt its performance in some games).

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

#24

Post by 1970-01-01 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #20
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 chea…

You're conflating a few things here. The Vista era was the biggest requirement hit. That was the time where people really needed a faster PC to continue browsing. Before that, you could get away with XP running on a sub-GHz processor.

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

#25

Post by hedora »

The Athlon XP was the bigger milestone, as I remember it.

They were both "seventh generation" according to their marketing, but you could get an entire GHz+ Athlon XP machine for much less than half the $990 tray price from the article.

I distinctly remember the day work bought a 5 or 6 node cluster for $2000. (A local computer shop gave us a bulk discount and assembled it for them, so sadly, I didn't poke around inside the boxes much.)

We had a Solaris workstation that retailed for $10K in the same office. Its per-core speed was comparable to one Athlon machine, so the cluster ran circles around it for our workload.

Intel was completely missing in action at that point, despite being the market leader. They were about to release the Pentium 4, and didn't put anything decent out from then to the Core 2 Duo. (The Pentium 4 had high clock rates, but low instructions per cycle, so it didn't really matter. Then AMD beat Intel to market with 64 bit support.)

I suspect history is in the process of repeating itself. My $550 AMD box happily runs Qwen 3.5 (32B parameters). An nvidia board that can run that costs > 4x as much.

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

#26

Post by dcminter »

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.

Just before I installed an SSD was the last time I owned a computer that felt slow.

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

#27

Post by coffeebeqn »

micv wrote: post #19
HPsquared wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There were quite a few mind blowing upgrades back in the day. The first sound card instead of PC beeper was one of my most memorable moments.

I remember loading up Doom, plugging my shitty earplugs that had a barely long enough cable and hearing the “real” shotgun sound for the first time. Oo-wee

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

#28

Post by bee_rider »

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…

It is true that we haven’t seen single core clock speeds increasing as fast, for a long while now. And I think everyone agrees that some nebulously defined “rate of computing progress” has slowed down.

But, we can be slightly less pessimistic if we’re more specific. Already by the early 90’s, a lot of the clock speed increase came from strategies like pipelines, superscalar instructions, branch prediction. Instruction level parallelism. Then in 200X we started using additional parallelism strategies like multicore and SMT.

It isn’t a meaningless distinction. There’s a real difference between parallelism that the compiler and hardware can usually figure out, and parallelism that the programmer usually has to expose.

But there’s some artificiality to it. We’re talking about the ability of parallel hardware to provide the illusion of sequential execution. And we know that if we want full “single threaded” performance, we have to think about the instruction level parallelism. It’s just implicit rather than explicit like thread-level parallelism. And the explicit parallelism is right there in any modern compiler.

If the syntax of C was slightly different, to the point where it could automatically add OpenMP pragmas to all it’s for loops, we’d have 30GHz processors by now, haha.

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

#29

Post by fnord77 »

st_goliath wrote: post #18
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 b…

only just last year did someone goose a PC cpu to 9.13ghz

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/core-i9-1490...

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

#30

Post by FpUser »

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.

Having RAM read / write faster will be of way more benefit
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