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Are Computers Still Getting Faster? [video]
- aaron695 11y agoHow about, because operating systems, browsers (& web sites) and a lot of other things have to run on mobile devices, programmers can no longer rely on specs increasing, they have to keep code more efficient.
- Svenstaro 11y agoThe author left out a comparison on graphics cards. There is a recent trend in computing (starting around 2008 when GPUs became freely programmable) where GPUs are the new real measure for horsepower in a high-performance computer due to their raw speed and usefulness in scientific computing and games.
- marshray 11y agoMaybe GPUs are the measure for horsepower because CPUs have dropped the torch so badly.
- Svenstaro 11y agoWell, to be fair these devices have fairly different purposes. One might argue that CPUs are in fact sufficient for what they do in most cases and all other cases should likely be somehow be ported to accelerator devices such as GPUs.
- jostmey 11y agoTransistor counts keep going up although clock speeds and single core performance peaked starting ten years ago. Check out this graphic: http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/DennardScaling.png http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Dennar... Since then there has been an explosion in number of cores. Seems like coding for distributed systems is the way to go. I suspect that increasing the transistor count will remain beneficial to things like scientific computing and machine learning.
- mikeash 11y agoIs there one with data past 2008 for single-threaded performance? I thought that was improving quite a bit, just with more instructions per clock rather than higher clock rates. Core counts don't seem to be going up that fast. A typical computer now might have four cores, which is far from an explosion.
- jacobolus 11y agoWhat’s a typical computer anymore? Cellphone? Mid-priced laptop? Desktop gaming machine? Video editing workstation?
- mikeash 11y agoI'd actually expect all of those examples to have four cores.
- magila 11y agoSingle-threaded performance hit a wall around 2011, especially if you take overclocking into account. The difference between an i7-2600K (2011) and an i7-6700K (2015), both at max overclock, is at most about 25% and often much less depending on the workload.
- Tepix 11y agoNot to mention that the i7-2600k sold for around 250€ whereas the i7-6700k costs more than 370€! Nowadays for 250€ you can only buy a i5-6600k which is around 25% faster than the i7-2600k in single core performance, but slightly slower in multi core performance due to lack of HT. Only the GPU inside these new CPUs has improved greatly.
- CyberDildonics 11y agoSingle threaded performance has gone up but not by that much. It is due to some pipelining, some reduced latency, some SIMD, some deeper reorder buffers, some more cache, better prefetching and probably other factors I'm forgetting. All have diminishing returns and Intel has no competition. Cores have gone up, just not in the narrow spectrum of consumer processors since not a lot of software takes advantage of them. Knights Landing will have 72 cores, all 4 way hyper threaded, all out of order cores. GPU's internal cores have gone up as well. Transistor budgets haven't stalled quite yet but lots of cheap journalism proclaims the end of moore's law because of consumer chip benchmarks. Intel has a roadmap to 7nm which will quadruple the amount of transistors we have now, after that it is unclear.
- Houshalter 11y agoMost computing power advancement is now in GPUs, which have had tremendous increases: Approximate cost per GFLOPS Date | 2013 US Dollars 1961 | $8.3 trillion 1984 | $42,780,000 1997 | $42,000 2000 | $1,300 2003 | $100 2007 | $52 2011 | $1.80 June 2013 | $0.22 November 2013 | $0.16 December 2013 | $0.12 January 2015 | $0.08
- pedrocr 11y agoIs that actual data or just an exponential approximation?
- kabdib 11y agoThe 1961 number has gotta be extrapolation, not actual data, or else there was some serious underground-city scale computing center buried in Antartica . . . Man from U.N.C.L.E. anyone? :-)
- sigmar 11y ago8.3 trillion per GFlop is equivalent to $8300 per Flop No underground city required
- swimfar 11y agoNot sure why you got downvoted, but just a small nitpick. It's FLOPS for FLoating-point Operations Per Second. Otherwise $8300 per FLoating-point OPeration would be quite pricy for almost any time period. ;)
- 0_00_0 11y agoCheaper to hire actual human computers at that point.
- Houshalter 11y ago
- bobajeff 11y agoThe biggest reason for old computers still being usable is that the market was long ago overshot by computer power. Most people simply don't need a lot of machine to do what they need on a computer. Where as early on computers were struggling to do things like display text and images the peak of user demands was the point where all computers could run Flash Player 9.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- trgn 11y agoTrue. The biggest advance in usable performance the last few years didn't come from faster processors but from SSDs.
- cowsandmilk 11y agoIn 2014, I upgraded both my parent's computers to SSDs. Dad has a 2006 desktop. Mom has a 2010 laptop. They both boot extremely quickly, faster than anything new with a spinning disk.
- BurningFrog 11y agoBut that wouldn't be important if people didn't want/need faster computers. See the "circular argument" argument above.
- argimenes 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- AshleysBrain 11y agoTo me the obvious answer is: you only need a certain amount of system resources to do most things, and consumer computers reached that point around 2005. (Sort of like his theory, but the software doesn't need to use any more resources at all any more.) Later improvements make it faster, easier to use, higher-resolution, better at multitasking etc., but none of that changed the yes/no question of "Will it work?"
- Pharaoh2 11y agoThis is absolutely not true. More computing power opens doors to software solution that wasn't even possibly before even to this day. It may be GPU accelerated now but even at this point we are op/s and W/hr limited.
- yogthos 11y agoThat's a rather unimaginative future you're painting. Things don't just keep getting incrementally better, but instead we get paradigm shifts. We're currently on the cusp of the machine learning paradigm shift. As ML keeps getting better, it will start showing up more and more in consumer interfaces. I'm willing to bet that within a few decades natural language interfaces will become the norm. The desktop paradigm will simply go away at that point. You'll just tell the computer what you want to do instead of having to juggle windows using the mouse and keyboard. You'll be able to say find that youtube video, play this song, or reply to that email. The computer will most likely turn into a personal assistant, and these kinds of machines will require a lot more power than what we currently have in desktops.
- VhMjGrWv 11y agoYou are so wrong about this. So wrong that I made a HN account for the first time in years just to respond to this. You're not the only one who thinks this, but you were the one who said it, so here you go: Your phone/computer's speech recognition is done by your phone/computer recording your voice and sending it to Microsoft/Apple/Google, then Microsoft/Apple/Google transcribing it on THEIR computers, storing your data, and sending the transcription back to your phone/computer. It doesn't require any processing power on your computer, besides the power to record and send your voice. You seem to think that because you bought a computer, that means that it's going to be your "personal assistant" unconditionally. It's not. It's going to give your voiceprint, location information, and other personally identifying information to MS/AAPL/GOOG. F/OSS might get similar features but they will lag years behind, and will not have the same impact on society that large corporations with datacenters/server farms can have. Eventually, you'll start seeing friendly suggestions and helpful tips, like your traffic schedule (this is already the case). You'll receive SUGGESTIONS on where to go. Friendly suggestions like, "Did you mean to go to the strip club/bar? How about going to church instead?" This could amplify inequality. Imagine Microsoft Clippy saying, "Hi, I noticed that you need $350 for crack rocks. May I suggest Honest Achmed's Pawn Shop only 1.2 miles from your trap house? We compared prices of the Internet of Things enabled devices you have on Amazon and we noticed that your 202X Macbook has a resale value of about $350." You'll eventually be CONTROLLED by some algorithm somewhere. There's nothing PERSONAL about the assistance they'll provide.
- jacobolus 11y agoI really wish people would use log scale for this kind of graph. Trying to study rates of growth on a linear scale is basically impossible during exponential-ish growth periods. All but the rightmost end of the chart gets squished flat along the horizontal axis. Similarly, charts of e.g. currency exchange rates, stock indices, comparative economic growth between countries, etc. should most of the time be plotted with a log-scaled vertical axis. Otherwise there’s no way to accurately compare slopes in different parts of the chart, which can be deeply misleading.
- kittiepryde 11y agoI think this video was targeted for a casual audience, that may not know what a log graph is.
- jacobolus 11y agoFor log scale charts aimed at the general public, the key is very clear labeling along the axis. I think most viewers can handle it okay; the bigger problem is that charting tools default to linear scale and most chart makers don’t think about it. It’s in some ways too bad that slide rules have been replaced by electronic calculators. I feel like the general public coming out of high school used to have more fluency with logarithms, which until the last generation or two were the basic tool for all calculation in science and engineering.
- joosters 11y agoI thought the lack of log scale was perfect here, he was demonstrating the exponential growth, so why hide it with a log scale?
- Houshalter 11y agoLog scales are extremely misleading. It looks like computing power has only increased a bit since the 1980s, when in fact it has increased orders of magnitude. Especially for a general audience, but even people familiar with log scales, it doesn't give an intuitive feel of the actual numbers.
- onli 11y agoGetting pretty clear already in the video that there is more than one effect. What is mentioned not clear enough/missing is the more difficult usage of the newer processors and their additional cores. You can see it in games. Until recently it was equally possible to play on an overclocked Pentium G3258 as on an i5-4690, a way more powerful quadcore processor, because most games just did not use the additional threads the i5 provided. That is changing now, so far that even the Hyperthreading of an i7 gets very useful in games. If that was true in games, that was probably also true for other software. Meaning that the new processors where not that more powerful for all those software not being able to use the multi-threading capabilities.
- hyperpallium 11y agoIn most features, my smartphone is about x1,000 more powerful than my ZX81 (from '81). RAM, "ROM", clockspeed. Accounting for no hardware fp (Z80), I estimated that my smartphone's GPU is about x1,000,000 the FLOPS. And high-end consumer video cards are about x1,000,000,000 ... which is about, or a little less, what one of the Moore's law corollaries predicts for 35 years, 1981 to 2016, per $.
- johansch 11y agoRAM: x1,000,000 (1 GB is medium-end in phones these days, and the ZX81 had 1kB.)
- hyperpallium 11y agowhoa, that was a significant error.
- mdasen 11y agoOne thing that they didn't quite touch on is the incredible increase in the performance of web browsers. They did talk about more and more people using a computer as a window to the internet, but didn't talk about how much more efficient the software powering that window had become. Apple launched Safari in 2003 and Chrome/V8 was released in 2008. So even as we've wanted our web apps to do more, the engines running them have gotten so much better. When most software that people were using was being written in C/C++, an increase in the amount of work the program wanted to do needed to be matched by an increase in performance. Compilers have gotten better, but nothing near the impact that modern web browsers have had. So older computers have benefitted from a huge increase in browser performance (the browser being the thing executing most "applications") over the past decade in a way that we never really saw in previous computing generations.
- fungos 11y agoGood thing browsers aren't written in javascript.
- tachyonbeam 11y agoAFAIK, much of the Firefox UI is written in JS. FF and Chrome extensions are too.
- fungos 11y agoYes, usually the slow parts of them all. The core libs, render and vm are c/c++ (or even a little rust).
- davorb 11y ago> One thing that they didn't quite touch on is the incredible increase in the performance of web browsers. This has largely been offset by the fact that we're sending more and more data over the wire. The average web site is now 2.1MB in size.[0] [0] http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/16/technology/web-slow-big/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/16/technology/web-slow-big/
- whistlerbrk 11y agoOne thing that was not mentioned was scheduling of processes especially on mobile devices. Many operating systems employ timer coalescing that along with other techniques serve to maximize power efficiency instead of CPU utilization
- pippy 11y agoThe thing that stuck out to me was the Geekbench score. 2,287 vs 6,350 over the course of a decade isn't that impressive improvement. Given it's reflective of what a computer can do, comparing metrics such as Ghz or gigaflops seems superfluous in the context to the average user. During the exponential improvement in 80's or the 90's, it seems like we have hit a brick wall. Not to say there hasn't been massive strides of improvement over the last decade, SSD and GPUs in particular have been spectacular. But many consumers have the decision they'ed oven rather have a power efficient processor than a heavy duty CPU. As developers it means being conscious of bloat and writing more efficient software. Already we're seeing many libraries that are closer to the hardware or 'metal'.
- tibbon 11y agoFor non-gaming, non-video-editing tasks, I partially see it as just the core tasks aren't changing that much. An operating system isn't doing that much more than it was 5-7 years ago. I'm using my 2011 Macbook Pro for Protools, and it feels just as fast as my 2014 model does for the rather paltry tasks I throw at it (I use outboard hardware for almost everything, mixing 16 tracks of audio was something a G3 Mac could handle easily). I don't see any reason I'll realistically need to upgrade it anytime soon (loaded with memory, SSD, etc)
- petke 11y agoQuite frankly, Im surprised the reason behind this isnt common knowledge, at least among us geeks. The reason is hardware designers have hit a wall, they cant make single threaded applications run any faster. So your brand new gaming PC is no faster at running single core applications than your 10 year old computer is. You can copy over any single core application from your new PC to your old one, and it will run just as fast. What your new computer has is more cores though. Ideally you want linear scaling. That is if you have 2 cores your program should run twice as fast, and if you have 256 it should run 256 times as fast. This kind of scaling is almost impossible to achieve. Most programs don't scale beyond a certain number of cores. Your multithreaded program might run a bit faster if you throw an extra core at it, but very quickly throwing more cores at it doesn't make a difference. It might even get slower. You have all those extra cores idle, or worse they are busy waiting. Most programs dont scale well to many cores because any synchronization between cores kill scalability. If you have ANY sequential steps in your application that will put a limit on scalability. As an example say you have 4 cores. You have a main loop on one core, it posts expensive work to the other (3) cores. And when they are done, you collect all the results and use them somehow. This final step is sequential and it kills your scaling. Your application wont run 4 times faster. And it probably wont run any faster if you throw 16 cores at it. This is because that one core is synchronizing with all the other cores. So those other cores do a lot of waiting around. And any sequential steps in that one core becomes the bottleneck, as those other cores will all end up waiting for it. This message is already too long. So long story short. Single threaded programs are no faster on new computers, and most multi threaded programs dont scale well to many cores. Its a huge wasted opportunity to let cores be idle or underutilized. We have to fundamentally change our programming style and tools to take make use of all available cores. More info by Herb Sutter: http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle/ http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle/
- Denzel 11y agoThe phenomenon you're describing is exhibited best by Amdahl's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law.
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- shultays 11y agoCan we preserve Moore's live by duct taping two computers together every decade?
- emgram769 11y agoa computer increases performance 10 fold: what takes 10 minutes now takes 1. we notice a difference of 9 whole minutes! wow! a new computer increases performance 10 fold: whoaaaa, that minute of waiting is now merely SECONDS! we saved like almost a whole minute of waiting! an even newer computer increases performance 10 fold: nice, thats like noticeabley faster: today, the newest computer is available: meh something from like 10 years ago would run this fine... we are getting to a point where other aspects of performance are also getting harder and harder to notice. things like rendering, supported display sizes and refresh rates, the ability for machines to understand us (voice recognition and computer vision)
- tim333 11y agoThe guy says roughly >The question I'm asking is why does a 10 year old computer basically run current software OK while that wasn't true in the past. I've got a theory that it's a bit related to human brain IO limits. There's only so much text, sound and video we can take in, video being the highest bandwidth and computers got to a stage where they could do video OK a decade of so ago. So increasing the output dramatically does not have a huge effect on user experience. I mean 4k video is nice but it's a similar experience to 360p.
- Pharaoh2 11y agoOr may be we are approaching a wall that is harder to climb than usual. With unlimited computing power we could render real time highly interactive super accurate simulations which takes months to render. But we can't because we don't have the computing power. The truth is, we are hitting multiple wall at the same time. It's harder to shrink gates any further, it's harder to increase clock speed anymore and it's harder to dissipate the heat generated by the cpus. All the increase we are now getting are incremental not exponential and that is why we can run a current software on a 10 year old cpu, if the software is not optimized for multicore cpus.
- tim333 11y agoOr a bit of both. You have a point that the performance of a single core has stopped increasing so fast. On the other hand if people really wanted performance they could get high powered desk top computers but the trend has been more towards using phones. About the most processor intensive thing I do personally is edit video and even that works OK on my 2 year old phone.
- Pharaoh2 11y agoI have no idea what type of video editing you are doing but editing 2.7k60 video on my high end gpu accelerated desktop is a pain in the ass. The adoption of mobile phones as computing platform is a very different event. It allows use of computing in a very versatile manner. That is why it's usage exploded.
- inesf 11y agoMy 2008 PC is still performing well. I think engineers should work more on the OS since sometimes we need to upgrade just because of the trash and useless things kept by the OS.
- Benjaminsen 11y agoAs other have touched on, the apparent slowdown in processor speeds is due to computers have enough CPU power for most users needs. Today computing power in personal computers is basically a commodity, with companies now having to focus on other aspects to be able to sell their computers. Namely weight, battery life, network connectivity etc. Having said that, the chips are still developing, but now the focusing is on the new user demands rather than raw speed. E.g. we now have native decoding of audio, video, networking, low power modes, etc to increase battery life. (And thereby decrease weight) While the consumer GPU's are also getting faster, it's not due to more advanced use cases, but rather because computers now have screens with higher screen resolutions. I believe that processing power became a commodity around a single core GeekBench Browser score of about 2500 (Think Late 2011 Macbook pro - note using browser score here to be able to compare apples to apples). Interestingly, this is now pretty much exactly where the newest iPhones are. (Android only just now reaching the 2k's). In essence, with the latest and greatest chips on mobile, we are reaching the point where processing speed is now a commodity on this platform. However as with PC's we will likely see a bit of overshooting, so expect the mobile CPU race to continue until around a GeekBench Browser score of 3000-3200. Hopefully this will result in companies starting to compete on battery life of the device as was seen with laptops. E.g. the newest MacBook Pro claims 9 hours of battery, compared to the 4 hours promised for the Late 2011 Macbook Pro. The only obvious unknown I can think of, is if the average consumer embraces Virtual Reality, rather than it becoming a niche such as high quality PC gaming. Then we might once again see a new strong focus towards raw single core computing power, both on Desktop and Mobile.