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Transistor counts keep going up although clock speeds and single core performance peaked starting ten years ago. Check out this graphic: http://www.extremetech
by jostmey 11y ago
Transistor 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.
- seanp2k2 11y ago6, 8, and 10-core configurations are coming to the higher-end desktop market soon: http://wccftech.com/intel-broadwell-e-hedt-computex-2016/ http://wccftech.com/intel-broadwell-e-hedt-computex-2016/ 22 and 24 cores coming to Xeons in 2016: http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-xeon-e5-e7-broadwell-processors-with-up-to-24-cores-due-in-2016/ http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-xeo...
- mikeash 11y agoThey've been available on the high end for a long time. I have a 2013 Mac Pro with 6 cores, for example. But it seems like the more average computer has not changed nearly as much in this area.
- joosters 11y agoSince then there has been an explosion in number of cores That graph shows no such thing... number of cores has flattened out from 2011-2015.