6 ms·

This is a real issue. At my company, we always buy the $300-$400 CPUs but they are barely getting faster with each generation. The last time there was a big j

This is a real issue. At my company, we always buy the $300-$400 CPUs but they are barely getting faster with each generation. The last time there was a big jump was with Nehalem.

foldor 11y ago
On the bright side, they're typically getting far more power efficient, and cooling them becomes easier.
- bhouston 11y ago
  For developer boxes, the price of power and cooling do not matter compared to developer productivity, and developer productivity can be in some cases hugely impacted by the speed of their PC (during builds, simulations or renders, etc.)
Someone1234 11y ago
Are many people often CPU capped anyway? How would you detect a performance increase unless you're over-utilising the machine. For example, my work machine has an i7, 8GB of RAM, and an SSD. I can cap IO and RAM, but I am yet to see the i7 max out, heck even over half the cores. I guess what I am saying is: Is CPU really a bottleneck most people encounter day to day anymore?
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Confused. Faster CPU means lower latency for all operations. Doesn't have to be maxed-out.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    > Faster CPU means lower latency for all operations. Not really. Per core CPUs have become slower and slower. It become about throughput and not raw per op speed a long time ago. Using that measure you'll want to install a Core Duo in your machine.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Depends entirely what 'it' is. Rendering in parallel - sure. But still most apps are single-threaded.
gh02t 11y ago
The performance jumps just got more specialized. For instance, introduction of AVX instructions made a huge performance bump for some areas, especially scientific, albeit you needed crazy cooling to run a program using AVX extensively for more than a few seconds. I can remember having around an 80% performance jump with one code I used compiled with vs. without AVX. x86 hardware virtualization extensions were another enormous performance boost. Hardware transactional memory was supposed to be a big (order of magnitude) boost to some things on Haswell but they ended up having to disable it. Through all this time though, I haven't noticed a massive overall performance boost in a long time. If all I wanted to do was browse the web and read email I'd probably still be using my Core 2 Duo MBP from forever ago. The speed boosts have been piecemeal, one generation improves one thing, the next something else. This is different from Ye Olden Days, I can remember upgrading from a 386 to a Pentium II to a Pentium 4 and each upgrade was so dramatic that it completely redefined what I could do with my computer. The last real performance jump I can remember was the Core Duo upgrade that brought real multicore. I do kinda miss my beloved old SPARCstation though. Makes me wonder what computing looks like in the alternative dimension where SPARC or one of the other architectures had taken over the PC market like Intel ultimately did.
- uxcn 11y ago
  There have been lots of other performance improvements, but I think they're less visible than other stuff. The CRC instruction that got added in SSE4.2 seems to get fairly wide use in hashes and stuff like btrfs. I think rdrand, aes, and clwb are interesting ones as well. I guess power consumption is kind of another visible gain. I think the biggest visible change recently though, at least as a software engineer, is the continuously lowering cost, increasing availability of, memory. I can literally store an entire project in memory and not have to worry about any network or disk bottleneck.

This is a real issue. At my company, we always buy the $300-$400 CPUs but they are barely getting faster with each generation. The last time there was a big jump was with Nehalem.

foldor 11y ago

On the bright side, they're typically getting far more power efficient, and cooling them becomes easier.

bhouston 11y ago
For developer boxes, the price of power and cooling do not matter compared to developer productivity, and developer productivity can be in some cases hugely impacted by the speed of their PC (during builds, simulations or renders, etc.)

Someone1234 11y ago

Are many people often CPU capped anyway? How would you detect a performance increase unless you're over-utilising the machine. For example, my work machine has an i7, 8GB of RAM, and an SSD. I can cap IO and RAM, but I am yet to see the i7 max out, heck even over half the cores. I guess what I am saying is: Is CPU really a bottleneck most people encounter day to day anymore?

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Confused. Faster CPU means lower latency for all operations. Doesn't have to be maxed-out.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  > Faster CPU means lower latency for all operations. Not really. Per core CPUs have become slower and slower. It become about throughput and not raw per op speed a long time ago. Using that measure you'll want to install a Core Duo in your machine.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Depends entirely what 'it' is. Rendering in parallel - sure. But still most apps are single-threaded.

gh02t 11y ago

The performance jumps just got more specialized. For instance, introduction of AVX instructions made a huge performance bump for some areas, especially scientific, albeit you needed crazy cooling to run a program using AVX extensively for more than a few seconds. I can remember having around an 80% performance jump with one code I used compiled with vs. without AVX. x86 hardware virtualization extensions were another enormous performance boost. Hardware transactional memory was supposed to be a big (order of magnitude) boost to some things on Haswell but they ended up having to disable it. Through all this time though, I haven't noticed a massive overall performance boost in a long time. If all I wanted to do was browse the web and read email I'd probably still be using my Core 2 Duo MBP from forever ago. The speed boosts have been piecemeal, one generation improves one thing, the next something else. This is different from Ye Olden Days, I can remember upgrading from a 386 to a Pentium II to a Pentium 4 and each upgrade was so dramatic that it completely redefined what I could do with my computer. The last real performance jump I can remember was the Core Duo upgrade that brought real multicore. I do kinda miss my beloved old SPARCstation though. Makes me wonder what computing looks like in the alternative dimension where SPARC or one of the other architectures had taken over the PC market like Intel ultimately did.

uxcn 11y ago
There have been lots of other performance improvements, but I think they're less visible than other stuff. The CRC instruction that got added in SSE4.2 seems to get fairly wide use in hashes and stuff like btrfs. I think rdrand, aes, and clwb are interesting ones as well. I guess power consumption is kind of another visible gain. I think the biggest visible change recently though, at least as a software engineer, is the continuously lowering cost, increasing availability of, memory. I can literally store an entire project in memory and not have to worry about any network or disk bottleneck.