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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

#51

Post by lysace »

hedora wrote: post #37
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…

Web browsing is still largely single/few-threaded in practice, afaik. (Right?)

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

#52

Post by sparkie »

mtucker502 wrote: post #2

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

That's not going to happen, but there's alternative research such as [1] where we get rid of the clock and use self-timed circuits.

[1]:https://arc.cecs.pdx.edu/

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

#53

Post by Hikikomori »

adrian_b wrote: post #17
vessenes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 increa…

Overclockers are pretty close.

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

#54

Post by dlcarrier »

gavinsyancey wrote: post #44
dlcarrier wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You joke, but it really is more work. Iv'e developed software in languages from assembly language to JavaScript, and for any given functionality it's been easier to write it in RISC assembly language running directly than to get something working reliably in JavaScript running on a framework in an interpreter in a VM in a web browser, where it's impossible to reliably know what a call is going to do, because everything is undocumented and untested.

One of the co-signers of the Agile Manifesto had previously stated that "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ward_Cunningham#L...) I'm convinced that the Agile Manifesto was an attempt to make an internet post of the most-wrong way to manage a software projects, in hopes someone would correct it with the right answer, but instead it was adopted as-is.

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

#55

Post by embedding-shape »

varispeed wrote: post #46
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.

Have you ever used proper desktop computers? I suppose such a move would feel significant if you've mostly been using laptops.

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

#56

Post by dlcarrier »

idiotsecant wrote: post #42
dlcarrier wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't follow your analogy. Can you elaborate?

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

#57

Post by moffkalast »

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.

For parallelism we already have SIMD units like AVX and well... GPUs. CPUs need higher single thread speeds for tasks that simply cannot make effective use of it.

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

#58

Post by nucleardog »

majormajor wrote: post #48
dlcarrier wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 col…

> 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.

For me they were.

I still remember the first PC I put together for someone with a SSD.

I had a quite beefy machine at the time and it would take 30 seconds or more to boot Windows, and around 45s to fully load Photoshop.

Built this machine someone with entirely low-end (think like "i3" not "Celeron") components, but it was more than enough for what they wanted it for. It would hit the desktop in around 10 seconds, and photoshop was ready to go in about 2 seconds.

(Or thereabouts--I did time it, but I'm remembering numbers from like a decade and a half ago.)

For a _lot_ of operations, the SSD made an order of magnitude difference. Blew my mind at the time.

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

#59

Post by michaelt »

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.

Because someone decided to write all the software in javascript and python, which don't benefit from the added cores.

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

#60

Post by random3 »

Fun times. Coolers, paste, fans, supply watts, dip switches and jumpers. Quake, Voodoo 3dfx vs NVidia GForce. This is where it all started, kids.

I was in high school and was running a "computer games club" (~ Internet cafe for games and kids) since 1998 when we got a place, renovated it ourselves, got custom built furniture (cheap narrow desks) and initially 6 computers - AMDs at 300Mhz. By 2000 we broke a wall in the adjacent space and had ~15, cable + satellite internet for downloads and whatever video cards we could buy or scrap. It was wild.

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