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Cool. Back then there still were articles about a new faster desktop CPU! Today, whenever there's news about a CPU, it's about some other low power mobile whatever thing that is not faster. Yawn.
Cool. Back then there still were articles about a new faster desktop CPU! Today, whenever there's news about a CPU, it's about some other low power mobile whatever thing that is not faster. Yawn.
I wonder: what ratio of FLOPs would you get, between this chip, and an array of "low power mobile whatever thing"s adding up to an equivalent power-draw?
If we can't make the clock speed faster what about massively increasing the size of the on chip cache? I think they call them like l2 and l3 or something. If I had 1gb of cache then maybe my whole program could run without doing much main memory access. That would be fast right?
Low power and multicore are cute and all, but imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384GHz cores.
We've made some progress with GHz :). http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239098/Desktop_chips...
Indeed, AMD announced their first 5ghz CPU in June at E3. http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-unleashes-201... It is for sale now at Newegg for $699. 4.7ghz with 5ghz turbo. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113...
Clock speed is an unfortunate marketing gimmick anymore. I dare compare it to peak horsepower. A 3ghz chip from today will run circles around a chip from 2002, and with less power to boot. AMD is ahead in the clock speed race, but gets beat handily by "slower" Intel processors, while using twice the power. The focus going forward is going to be on power efficiency and using more cores, not clock speed.
However, I think it's unfair to say clock speed is an unfortunate marketing gimmick "anymore" when it was a gimmick all the way back in 2002 when Intel released the 3.06 GHz "Northwood" Pentium 4 that the OP's linked article references. In fact, it was a gimmick that caused one of the biggest strategy/roadmap blunders Intel ever made.
Intel designed NetBurst (the architecture that the P4 was based on) to do one thing really well: allow Intel to ramp up clock speeds quickly. The architectural choices they made to enable this severely hobbled the P4's performance, especially the 20 (later 31!) stage pipeline that made the penalty for branch mispredictions pretty awful.
Intel eventually released P4s that clocked as high as 3.8 GHz and had an unheard of (in the x86 space) 115 watt TDP, but when the Athlon 64 was released, AMD could smoke Intel's fastest P4s using slower clocked CPUs with lower TDPs. Instead of focusing on raw clock speed, AMD focused on architectural improvements like x86-64, HyperTransport, and an integrated memory controller. (Intel CPUs wouldn't see QPI or an integrated memory controller until Nehalem, released five years after the first Athlon 64.)
As you say, the tables are now turned — clock for clock, the IPC of AMD's Piledriver core is behind that of even Intel's (two generations old) Sandy Bridge core, and all AMD seems to be able to do is add more cores and crank up the clock speed. Unfortunately for AMD, adding more cores doesn't help single-threaded performance, and a very nasty side-effect of increasing clock speed is that the processor's TDP increases disproportionately: the 4.7 GHz FX-9590 has a whopping 220 watt TDP, while the 4.0 GHz FX-8350's TDP is 125 watts.
Clock speed is an unfortunate marketing gimmick anymore. I dare compare it to peak horsepower. A 3ghz chip from today will run circles around a chip from 2002, and with less power to boot. AMD is ahead in the clock speed race, but gets beat handily by "slower" Intel processors, while using twice the power. The focus going forward is going to be on power efficiency and using more cores, not clock speed.
Low power and multicore are cute and all, but imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384GHz cores.
Instructions per cycle has been getting somewhat better, and it is that number multiplied by the clock speed that is a better indicator of actual performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle Everything else needs to keep up to - it is pointless having a fast processor if it has to keep waiting on memory, storage and the network. Those are very slowly catching up and also lead to overall improved p…
I sat in on a few sales calls from Intel about their new Pentium M / "Centrino" mobile architecture in 2003. What was amazing was that their performance graphs showed that Centrino had all the performance of P4, but with much lower power.
Basically, the terrible P4 microarchitecture, plus Intel's incompatible 64-bit approach (Itanium, aka "the Itanic"), left a big hole in the market where AMD stepped in and mopped up for 3-4 years with Opterons, the first 64-bit x86 processors.
Even today, x64 architecture is called "AMD64" for this reason -- AMD defined the instruction set, and Intel had to follow (for once).
IPC is undoubtedly much higher today, plus now similar machines would have 4 cores or more.
Instructions per cycle has been getting somewhat better, and it is that number multiplied by the clock speed that is a better indicator of actual performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle Everything else needs to keep up to - it is pointless having a fast processor if it has to keep waiting on memory, storage and the network. Those are very slowly catching up and also lead to overall improved p…
This was in Intel's dark days of P4 / "Netburst" microarchitecture. They goosed lots of GHz out of the chip by going with a very deep pipeline, but performance in real-world applications was terrible. (deep processor pipelines kill you when you mispredict a branch). I sat in on a few sales calls from Intel about their new Pentium M / "Centrino" mobile architecture in 2003. What was amazing was that their performance…