40 Years of Microprocessor Trend Data (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: 40 Years of Microprocessor Trend Data (2015)

#11

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Nov 26, 2018, 11:58 AM UTC

ido wrote: post #10

wiz21c wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it me or we already use that parallelism a lot, that is, while the operating system runs serveral single threaded apps in aprallel ?

ok, but how many of these do you need? would you notice a jump from a 16-core CPU to a 128-core CPU just due to a bunch of single threaded apps? Anecdotally my several years old iMac [0] has 4-cores/8-threads and I already only notice more threads when parallel-compiling (compared to my 2C/4T i7-Skylake laptop). [0] https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-i7-3...

> ok, but how many of these do you need?

For what? A web server (the most common application around) can use one for each simultaneous connection. They don't even have to be on the same box. A database server is limited on IO, but can use many CPU cores to speed-up things. A component on the latest "productivity" suite can probably use only one, but should require an entire one anyway, and your usual Win10 desktop has plenty of stupid stuff to run by its own, while your usual Linux desktop was already idling 90% of the time a decade ago.

It is always a matter of what are you doing. If your task is inherently serial, do you need it done only once?

Re: 40 Years of Microprocessor Trend Data (2015)

#12

Post by ido » Mon, Nov 26, 2018, 12:14 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #11

ido wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, but how many of these do you need? would you notice a jump from a 16-core CPU to a 128-core CPU just due to a bunch of single threaded apps? Anecdotally my several years old iMac [0] has 4-cores/8-threads and I already only notice more threads when parallel-compiling (compared to my 2C/4T i7-Skylake laptop). [0] https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-i7-3...

> ok, but how many of these do you need? For what? A web server (the most common application around) can use one for each simultaneous connection. They don't even have to be on the same box. A database server is limited on IO, but can use many CPU cores to speed-up things. A component on the latest "productivity" suite can probably use only one, but should require an entire one anyway, and your usual Win10 desktop ha…

For a ‘normal’ end-user desktop/laptop (not a server) I think you’d hit diminishing returns quickly after about 8 threads. If we’re tlaking long term growth we’d want e.g. a 128 core CPU (possibly only a few more years from today) to still be an improvement for the common usecase compared to the previous 64 core generation.

Also for the billions of computers around the most common application is probably a web browser, not a web server.

Re: 40 Years of Microprocessor Trend Data (2015)

#13

Post by rijoja » Mon, Nov 26, 2018, 1:05 PM UTC

igravious wrote: post #8

francoisLabonte wrote: post #7

As one of the authors of the original paper the data is based on I have fond memories as a graduate student of standardizing the performance data to SpecInt which did not exist till the 2000s. So for the older processors that were no longer available I looked hard for processors that had both SpecInt and older benchmarks like Dhrystone and MIPS per seconds to normalize them to SpecInt performance. The same data was u…

Excellent work! From the latest data ( https://www.karlrupp.net/2018/02/42-years-of-microprocessor-... ) you can definitely see that single-threaded performance is still increasing but not at the exponential clip it was. The inflection point for that is around the mid-2000s. It is hard to eyeball because the chart is logarithmic but the rate of increase looks to be sub-exponential for the past decade or so. MHz and W…

What are youre thoughts on golang from my shallow investigations they seem to have a fairly good model readily available built into the language