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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

#81

Post by accrual »

vachina wrote: post #34
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. I feel this. Humanity has peaked.

Every time Discord updates (which is often) I'm like "cool, slightly more code to run on the same hardware..."

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

#82

Post by matheusmoreira »

myself248 wrote: post #75
steve1977 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster I think there's a difference between bloat and actually useful features or performance. For example, I started making music with computers in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers. Nowadays, I can do everything I could do with all that equipment on an iPad! I wou…

> in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers. Tell that to ScreamTracker!

In case anyone's wondering:

https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw

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

#83

Post by accrual »

st_goliath wrote: post #18
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.

> The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. About a week ago, completely out of the blue, YouTube recommended this old gem to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jQZxH7NgM A Pentium 4, overclocked to 5GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling. Watching this was such an amazing throwback. I remember clearly the last time I saw it, which was when an excited friend showed it to me on a PC at our schools library. A year or so b…

IIRC, part of the GHz problem is that very long pipelines like that of the Pentium 4 tend to show increasing benefits at higher clocks. If you can keep the pipeline full then the system reaps the benefits. Sort of like a drag racer - goes very fast in a straight line but terrible on corners.

But with longer pipelines comes larger penalties when the pipeline needs to be flushed, so the P4 eventually hit a wall and Intel returned to the late Pentium 3 Tualatin core, refining it into the Pentium M which later evolved into the first Core CPUs.

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

#84

Post by jstanley »

steve1977 wrote: post #69
dlcarrier wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster, so you had to upgrade to a new CPU every few years to run the latest software. With SSDs, there was a huge overlap in CPU speeds that may or may not have an SSD, so upgrading to one meant a huge performance boost, within the same set of runnable software. Also, going from Sim City to Sim City 2000 was pre-bloat. Over t…

> That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster I think there's a difference between bloat and actually useful features or performance. For example, I started making music with computers in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers. Nowadays, I can do everything I could do with all that equipment on an iPad! I wou…

There is definitely bloat. A few months ago I was messing about with making a QWERTY piano in a web page, and it was utterly unplayable due to the bloat-induced latency in between the fingers and the ears.

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

#85

Post by iknowstuff »

dlcarrier wrote: post #54
gavinsyancey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 everythi…

What’s the most complex thing you wrote in RISC assembly?

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

#86

Post by iknowstuff »

rr808 wrote: post #36
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.

Well it kinda was! seeing how power efficient iPhone chips are despite hovering the top of single core benchmarks.

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

#87

Post by iknowstuff »

ahartmetz wrote: post #80
hedora wrote: post #25

The Athlon XP was the bigger milestone, as I remember it. They were both "seventh generation" according to their marketing, but you could get an entire GHz+ Athlon XP machine for much less than half the $990 tray price from the article. I distinctly remember the day work bought a 5 or 6 node cluster for $2000. (A local computer shop gave us a bulk discount and assembled it for them, so sadly, I didn't poke around ins…

The article links to a list of "The five greatest AMD CPUs". I've owned two and a half of these! Athlon XP 1800+, Ryzen 7 1700 (I had the 1800X which was just a higher bin of the same chip), and Ryzen 9 3950X. That same article also says that extending x86 to 64 bits "wasn't hard", which I'm not so sure about. There are plenty of mistakes AMD could have made and cleanups they could have missed, but they handled it al…

Next up AI 395+. I love this thing. Sips power!

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

#88

Post by johnflan »

layer8 wrote: post #11
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…

On the plus side, the 486DX-33 didn’t require active cooling. The second half of the 1990s was when home computing started to become noisy, and the art of trying to build silent PCs began.

The CPU didn’t but the chonker of a fan in the PSU sure made up for it

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

#89

Post by ahartmetz »

iknowstuff wrote: post #87
ahartmetz wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article links to a list of "The five greatest AMD CPUs". I've owned two and a half of these! Athlon XP 1800+, Ryzen 7 1700 (I had the 1800X which was just a higher bin of the same chip), and Ryzen 9 3950X. That same article also says that extending x86 to 64 bits "wasn't hard", which I'm not so sure about. There are plenty of mistakes AMD could have made and cleanups they could have missed, but they handled it al…

Next up AI 395+. I love this thing. Sips power!

I got one of these in a laptop. For a laptop, not really, especially in idle (6-7 watts for the whole laptop). It's quite good anyway.

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

#90

Post by prmoustache »

myself248 wrote: post #75
steve1977 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster I think there's a difference between bloat and actually useful features or performance. For example, I started making music with computers in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers. Nowadays, I can do everything I could do with all that equipment on an iPad! I wou…

> in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers. Tell that to ScreamTracker!

Screamtracker was sampling. Great for the days and much more accesible for the teenager I was than buying and controlling synths but that was not exactly same. More a competition to the early akai MPCs.

And we were mostly ripping those samples from records on cassettes and CDs, or other mods.

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