5 ms·

CydeWeys is correct. To quote a previous post of mine: ---------------------- The fastest CPU in 2005 was (I think) the mighty AMD Athlon 64 FX-57, which Pass

by phaemon 11y ago

CydeWeys is correct. To quote a previous post of mine: ---------------------- The fastest CPU in 2005 was (I think) the mighty AMD Athlon 64 FX-57, which PassMark rates at: 731. Meanwhile, in 2015, we have the Intel Core i7-5930K which scores: 13,638. -------------------- I really have no idea where this crazy idea that 2005 was the pinnacle of consumer CPU power comes from...

tormeh 11y ago
When people say things like that, they usually bemoan the radical slowdown in single-thread performance improvements. For some problems that's all that matters, and the people that have such problems are understandably disappointed. Moore's law is alive and well (at least for now) for low-power and multicore, but for single-thread desktop-class chips things have slowed down a lot.
edmccard 11y ago
>I really have no idea where this crazy idea that 2005 was the pinnacle of consumer CPU power comes from... As 'tormeh said, single-threaded performance has not improved as much since 2005. For example, the Passmark single-thread rating for the Athlon 64 FX-57[1] is 832 and for the i7-5930K[2] is "only" 2081. [1] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+64+FX-57 http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+64+FX-57 [2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5930K+%40+3.50GHz https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5930K...
- zackmorris 11y ago
  To put this in perspective: for the decades before 2005 when performance per price matched 1:1 with transistor price, speeds increased roughly 100x per decade. That's 2^(10/1.5) ~= 102 for an 18 month doubling period. So between 2005 and 1015, they only increased 2081/832 ~= 2.5. Single-thread performance increase at a given price is effectively dead (for now). The sad thing about this (that I've been ranting about since around 2000) is that increasing parallel performance is so trivial that small companies like 3dfx were doing it with Voodoo cards back in the mid 90s. It’s only gotten easier since, so now it’s so streamlined that video card companies just keep doubling the number of cores with little deep insight into how to generalize what they are doing. Their monopolization has hurt research into things like using FPGAs for general-purpose parallel computing, and what’s stung perhaps even more than that is being locked into narrow-focus approaches like CUDA and OpenCL. Increasing serial performance is relatively straightforward. If companies hadn't doubled down on things like caching in the race for more speed, we could have moved to small/exotic chips using rather well-understood materials like Gallium Arsenide. Probably the easiest way to go about this is to reject relying on the clout of big companies. I’d like to see an architecture like MIPS with say a 4-8 stage branch-predicting pipeline and well-understood engineering tradeoffs implemented in a SiGe or graphene processor with on the order of 10,000-100,000 transistors, running above 10 GHz. This isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, because so much has been invested in status quo fabs, but I keep hoping that some of the older fabs might throw their hands up and try retooling with some of this 90s technology rather than going out of business.

by phaemon 11y ago

tormeh 11y ago

When people say things like that, they usually bemoan the radical slowdown in single-thread performance improvements. For some problems that's all that matters, and the people that have such problems are understandably disappointed. Moore's law is alive and well (at least for now) for low-power and multicore, but for single-thread desktop-class chips things have slowed down a lot.

edmccard 11y ago

>I really have no idea where this crazy idea that 2005 was the pinnacle of consumer CPU power comes from... As 'tormeh said, single-threaded performance has not improved as much since 2005. For example, the Passmark single-thread rating for the Athlon 64 FX-57[1] is 832 and for the i7-5930K[2] is "only" 2081. [1] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+64+FX-57 http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+64+FX-57 [2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5930K+%40+3.50GHz https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5930K...

zackmorris 11y ago
To put this in perspective: for the decades before 2005 when performance per price matched 1:1 with transistor price, speeds increased roughly 100x per decade. That's 2^(10/1.5) ~= 102 for an 18 month doubling period. So between 2005 and 1015, they only increased 2081/832 ~= 2.5. Single-thread performance increase at a given price is effectively dead (for now). The sad thing about this (that I've been ranting about since around 2000) is that increasing parallel performance is so trivial that small companies like 3dfx were doing it with Voodoo cards back in the mid 90s. It’s only gotten easier since, so now it’s so streamlined that video card companies just keep doubling the number of cores with little deep insight into how to generalize what they are doing. Their monopolization has hurt research into things like using FPGAs for general-purpose parallel computing, and what’s stung perhaps even more than that is being locked into narrow-focus approaches like CUDA and OpenCL. Increasing serial performance is relatively straightforward. If companies hadn't doubled down on things like caching in the race for more speed, we could have moved to small/exotic chips using rather well-understood materials like Gallium Arsenide. Probably the easiest way to go about this is to reject relying on the clout of big companies. I’d like to see an architecture like MIPS with say a 4-8 stage branch-predicting pipeline and well-understood engineering tradeoffs implemented in a SiGe or graphene processor with on the order of 10,000-100,000 transistors, running above 10 GHz. This isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, because so much has been invested in status quo fabs, but I keep hoping that some of the older fabs might throw their hands up and try retooling with some of this 90s technology rather than going out of business.