Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 162 posts

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

#41

Post by vaylian »

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.

You technically don't even need a 300MHz processor for the use cases that you name. But Intel and others kept developing faster CPUs anyway.

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

#42

Post by idiotsecant »

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…

This is silly. That's like saying that machines haven't gotten any better because a helicopter doesn't eat any less hay than a horse did.

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

#43

Post by jmyeet »

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.

That wasn't how it worked.

Up until the 486, the clock speed and bus speed were basically the same and topped out at about 33MHz (IIRC). The 486 started the thing of making the CPU speed a multiple of the bus speed eg 486dx2/66 (33MHz CPU, 66MHz bus), 486dx4/100 (25MHz CPU, 100MHz bus). And that's continued to this day (kind of).

But the point is the CPU became a lot faster than the IO speed, including memory. So these "overdrive" CPUs were faster but not 2-4x faster.

Also, in terms of impact, yeah there was a massive incrase in performance through the 1990s but let's not forget the first consumer GPUs, namely 3dfx Voodoo and later NVidia and ATI. Oh, Matrox Millenium anyone?

It's actually kind of wild that NVidia is now a trillion dollar company. It listed in 1998 for $12/share and adjusted for splits, Google is telling me it's ~3700x now.

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

#44

Post by gavinsyancey »

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.

The only thing more impressive that hardware engineers' delivering continuous massive performance improvements for the past several decades is software engineers' ability to completely erase that with more and more bloated programs to do essentially the same thing.

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

#45

Post by tosti »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #24
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not how I remember recent history because Linux was already pretty good before microslop XP came out. I've been daily driving cheap junk ever since, no regrets.

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

#46

Post by varispeed »

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 don't know. I felt this way when switching from Intel laptop to Apple M1. I am still using it today and I prefer it over desktop PC.

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

#48

Post by majormajor »

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…

Anytime you upgraded from a 4 year old computer to a new one back then - from 16Mhz to 90Mhz, or 75Mhz to 333Mhz, or 333Mhz to 1Ghz, or whatever - it was immediate, it was visceral.

SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change.

The software, in those days, was similarly making much bigger leaps every few years. 256 colors to millions, resolution, capabilities (real time spellcheck! a miracle at the time.) A chat app isn't a great comparison. Games are the most extreme example - Sim City to Sim City 2000; Doom to Quake; Unreal Tournament to Battlefield 1942 - but consider also a 1995 web browser vs a 1999 one.

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

#49

Post by jmyeet »

I have a hard time remembering what computers I had in the 1990s now. I had an 8086 in the 1980s. I think the next one I had was a 486/33 in the early 90s and I had this for years. I remember having a Cyrix 586 at some point later. I think the next jump was in the early 2000s and I honestly don't rmeember what that CPU was so I can't say when I got my first 1GHz+ CPU. Probably that 2002 PC. No idea what it was now. But it did survive in some form for another 12 years.

Fun fact #1: many today may not know that the only reason switched to the Pentium name was because a court ruled that they couldn't trademark a number and AMD had cross-licensed the microarchitecture and instruction set to AMD and Cyrix.

It was the Pentium 4 when clock speeds went insane and became a huge marketing point even though Pentium chips had lower IPC than Athlons (at that time). There was a belief that CPUs would keep going to 10GHz+. Instead they hit a ceiling at about ~3GHz, that's barely increased to this day (ignoring burst modes).

Intel originally intended to move workstations and servers to the EPIC architecture (eg Merced was an early chip in this series). This began in the 1990s but was years delayed and required writing software a very particular way. It never delievered on its promise.

And AMD, thanks to the earlier cross-licensing agreement, just ate Intel's lunch with the Athlon 64 starting in 2003 by adding the x86_64 instructions, which we still use today.

Fun Fact #2: it was the Pentium 3 that saved Intel's hide long after it was discontinued in favor of the Pentium 4.

The early 2000s were the nascent era of multi-core CPUs. The Pentium 3 had survived in mobile chips and become the Pentium-M and then the Core Duo (and Core 2 Duo later). This was the Centrino platform and included wireless (IIRC 802.11b/g). The Pentium 4 hit the Gigahertz ceiling and EPIC wasn't going to happen to Intel went back to the drawing board, revived the mobile Pentium-3 platform, adding AMD's 64 bit instructions and released their desktop CPUs. Even modern Intel CPUs are in many ways a derivation of the Pentium-3 [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_processors

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

#50

Post by KeplerBoy »

nurettin wrote: post #32
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meh, avx is also just parallelism. That won't get you around Amdahl's law.
Post reply on HN