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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

#31

Post by davidee »

I have very fond memories of my first dual-cpu Athlon machine.

It was the workstation on which I learned Logic Audio before, you know, Apple bought Emagic. I took that machine, running very low latency Reason to live gigs with my band.

Carting around a full-tower computer (not to mention the large CRT monitor we needed) next to a bunch of tube Fender & Ampeg amps was wild at the time. Finding a good drummer was hard; we turned that challenge into a lot of fun programming rhythm sections we could jam to, and control in real-time, live.

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

#32

Post by nurettin »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #13
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.

Single core speed is absolutely a thing that is needed and preferred to multicore. That's why we have avx, amx, etc.

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

#33

Post by dlcarrier »

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.

In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) the steady across-the-board increase in processing power didn't equate to programs running much faster, e.g. Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago.

SSDs provided a huge bump in performance to each individual computer, but trickled their way into market saturation over a generation or two of computers, so you'd be effectively running the same software but in a much more responsive environment.

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

#34

Post by vachina »

dlcarrier wrote: post #33
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.

In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's Law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law ) the steady across-the-board increase in processing power didn't equate to programs running much faster, e.g. Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago. SSDs provided a huge bump in performance to each in…

> Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago.

I feel this. Humanity has peaked.

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

#35

Post by dlcarrier »

magic_man wrote: post #4
mtucker502 wrote: post #2

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

The energy consumed is cv^2f. It makes no sense to keep increasing frequency as you make power way worse.

At lower frequencies, leakage current plays a larger role than gate capacitance, so for any given process node, there's a sweet spot. For medium to low loads, it takes less power to rapidly switch between cutting off power to a core, and running at a higher frequency than is needed, than to run at a lower frequency.

Newer process nodes decrease the per-gate capacitance, increasing the optimal operating frequency.

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

#36

Post by rr808 »

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.

I still remember my first CPU with a heatsink. It seemed like a temporary dumb hack.

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

#37

Post by hedora »

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…

Clock speed increases definitely slowed down, but now that software can use parallelism better, we're seeing big wins again. Current desktop/laptop packages are doing 100 trillion operations per second. The article's processor could do one floating point op per cycle, or 1B ops. So, we've seen a 100,000x speedup in the last 25 years. That's a doubling every ~ 1.5 years since 2000.

It's not quite apples-to-apples, of course, due to floating point precision decreasing since then, vectorization, etc, but it's not like progress stopped in 2000!

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

#39

Post by hedora »

adrian_b wrote: post #9
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…

"The era of exponentially rising clock speeds" was already over in 2003, when the 130-nm Pentium 4 reached 3.2GHz. All the later CMOS fabrication processes, starting with the 90-nm process (in 2004), have provided only very small improvements in the clock frequency, so that now, 23 years later after 2003, the desktop CPUs have not reached a double clock frequency yet. In the history of computers, the decade with the…

Sort of: The Pentium 4 was a strange chip. It had way too many pipeline steps, and was basically just chasing high clock speed marketing numbers instead of performance. In other words, it hit "3.2GHz" by cheating.

I'd argue you'd need to use AMD's Athlon XP or 64 bit processors, or either Pentium 3 / Core 2 Duo to figure out when clock speeds stopped increasing.

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

#40

Post by dlcarrier »

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.

AMD being competitive at the time is what mattered, but there's still technological advancement needed for them to be competitive. In this case, it was AMD using copper interconnects that allowed them to not only hit 1 GHz, but quickly clock up from there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon#Original_release
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