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They're acting as cache, to hide the latency to your RAM. They're implementing increasingly niche instructions that speed up ever smaller sets of programs. They
by alcari 11y ago
They're acting as cache, to hide the latency to your RAM. They're implementing increasingly niche instructions that speed up ever smaller sets of programs. They're mostly sitting idle, because power usage hasn't fallen at nearly the rate of increasing density, so switching them all at the same time is a great way to start a fire.
A significant part of the exponential gains in the '90s and early 2000s was that clock speed kept increasing. That's been stagnant for years because of heat problems.
- lmm 11y agoIt's worth saying what's really happening here is that no-one cares about the desktop. Heat is important for servers and mobile, and modern CPUs are designed for that with desktops as an afterthought. On a desktop the abandoned Pentium 4 architecture can clock up to 12GHz and will beat modern CPUs for at least some workloads.
- john_reel 11y agoReally? Are there any benchmarks available?