8 ms·

@Intel: how about thinking about 10GHz single core CPUs? And where is Atom? Why are we stuck in 2006 era CPU singe core performance? @nVidia: how about thinkin

by frik 10y ago

@Intel: how about thinking about 10GHz single core CPUs? And where is Atom? Why are we stuck in 2006 era CPU singe core performance? @nVidia: how about thinking about affordable high end GPUs? The GPUs got 400% more expensive since 2011. It's a pitty that AMD bought ATI, and now they can't compete with Intel and nVidia. And we all have to suffer and pay higher prices and get less performance - because no real competition exists any more.

raverbashing 10y ago
MHz/GHz are overrated. Not to mention today's 3GHz Intel and AMD offerings are much faster (per core) than let's say, the 3GHz offerings of 10y (?) ago nVidia got their bets right with investing on uses other than gaming for their GPUs now they're eating AMD/ATI in the deep learning field Affordable and High End are rarely on the same phrase, so there's your answer to when nVidia is going to do that
- protomyth 10y ago
  MHz/GHz is basically RPM in a car, not the greatest determinate of speed.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Correct Example: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+4+1500MHz https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Pentiu... Other examples: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel,264-18.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel,264-18.html
  - squeaky-clean 10y ago
    What a perfect analogy! Next time I'm having this discussion with people, I'll have to remember this.
  - hvidgaard 10y ago
    Except that the absolute pinnacle of motorsport go as high as they can because it is what produces the most power. Not that this matter for normal cars.
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Sure, some sports car engines turn at over 9,000 RPM, but a car stuck in 1st gear on 9 inch wide street tires is not going to go faster than the same car in 5th with 11.5 inch wide racing tires. Even at the pinnacle of motorsport RPM is a poor determinant of speed, it takes a whole system.
      - hvidgaard 10y ago
        That is true, but at least for engines, it's a fairly safe bet, that if the engines goes beyond 12k rpm, it's build for speed. That said, I suppose this differs depending on wether or not you think of the gearbox as a part of the engine (CPU) or not.
        protomyth 10y ago
        My analogy was comparing the CPU to a car, so I do consider the gearbox. An engine, no matter how many RPMs it can turn, is pretty useless without the vehicle.
    - slededit 10y ago
      The redline is almost never the point of peak horsepower. This is primarily driven by the fact that the valves can't close/open fast enough at these speeds. Its much worse on domestic vehicles that have to care about fuel efficiency (and so can't use stiffer springs) but the effect is still visible even in race cars.
      - hvidgaard 10y ago
        In F1 the previous generation engines was limited to 18k rpm by the regulations. They could go higher, and since they always went up to the 18k, it's safe to say it provided the most power, otherwise they would have shifted before.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cfallin 10y ago
> @Intel: how about thinking about 10GHz single core CPUs? They tried that -- the Pentium 4. The key design goal was to push clock speed as high as possible, and they used some crazy tricks, like 30-some-stage pipelines, a really long instruction scheduling loop with a pretty long lookahead, a double-pumped ALU with staggered 16-bit half-adds, etc. Fascinating from a microarchitecture perspective, but the big lesson was that high clock speeds sacrifice efficiency. The tricks needed to get there cause a lot of performance outliers/bad cases too -- e.g. the instruction scheduling replay system on lookahead conflicts was notorious for "tornados" which would kill IPC. And the branch prediction of the day was somewhat suboptimal for the pipeline lengths involved. > Why are we stuck in 2006 era CPU singe core performance? We aren't! The core microarchitecture teams at Intel and their competitors have made a lot of incremental progress -- Intel gets about 15% single-thread performance per generation, for example. No one is evilly scheming and holding back from turning a knob higher. There's just a lot of really hard engineering. Clock speed has topped out due to power limitations so we're at the point of looking for better branch prediction algorithms, cache replacement algorithms, and lots of little tricks everywhere to optimize bad cases. It's hard work (this was my job for a bit). I'd recommend looking at, e.g., the proceedings of ISCA and MICRO conferences in the 2000-2006 timeframe -- this was when the industry and associated academia figured out that chasing clock speed was a losing battle after a certain point.
- sirsar 10y ago
  What does it mean to have a "double pumped" ALU? Google is failing me.
  - cfallin 10y ago
    The ALU performs an operation on half of the machine word (16 of the 32 bits) each half-cycle, i.e., one on the rising edge and one on the falling edge of the clock. Basically they split the carry chain across two (half-)pipe stages and then run it twice as fast. See Hinton et al., "The microarchitecture of the Pentium 4 processor" [1] for all the nifty details -- pp 8-9, and Fig 7 in particular. [1] http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/koren/ece568/papers/Pentium4.pdf http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/koren/ece568/papers/Pentium4.pd...
xyience 10y ago
Atom is no longer needed since their non-atom CPUs have a low enough power profile now. We're stuck in single core performance hell because physics. I don't know where you've been but GPU competition between nvidia and AMD has been pretty healthy for the last few years, and AMDs specifically have been quite affordable. (That's not even taking into account they easily paid for themselves with Litecoin mining at one point.) It's only CPU competition that has been dead, but that's been the case ever since the Core line came out. (I guess you could count ARM too for low-end CPU competition, but both Intel and ARM can actually afford to lose that market entirely as their businesses are propped up by other things.)
- paulmd 10y ago
  Competition really hasn't been healthy, beginning with the Kepler generation. Ever since then, AMD has been unable to get a solid win, and most of their cards have been rebrands. They're still running some first-gen GCN chips (dating back to 2012) in their current lineup. Heck, some of their prices have actually increased in the last few years (eg the 390 rebrand raised the price by $100). NVIDIA held the upper hand with GK110 (780/Titan), then AMD dropped the 290X. This forced NVIDIA to readjust their prices and release the 780 Ti as an interim measure, but they held onto their lead position. Then NVIDIA started with the Maxwell series, which drastically improved both performance and efficiency. AMD tried to respond to the Titan X with the Fury X, but NVIDIA cut the legs out from under them by releasing the 980 Ti. Now once again AMD is behind the performance curve - NVIDIA has staked out the high-end space with the 1080 and the midrange with the 1070, and AMD is stuck in the low-end market with the RX480 until NVIDIA can get GP106 out. AMD's response to the 1080 is going to be the Vega 10 chip, and unfortunately it's unlikely to be released before Q4 2016 at the earliest (more likely Q1 or Q2 2017). NVIDIA already has GP102 coming down the pipe, which is going to be a Titan/1080 Ti, and they'll drop that when they feel it's necessary to spoil AMD's sales. That's the story of AMD and NVIDIA recently. AMD has put out some cards that were good value for the money - both the 7950/7970 and 290/290X have been very long-lived performers (and will likely continue to perform well thanks to DX12). But they haven't taken the top since 2012, all they can do at this point is force some price reductions. Like it or not they aren't a serious competitor in the GPU space any more than they are in the CPU space. They are a budget choice, not a serious contender.
RussianCow 10y ago
> @Intel: how about thinking about 10GHz single core CPUs? And where is Atom? Why are we stuck in 2006 era CPU singe core performance? Because that's physically impractical (if not impossible) with today's technology. Intel themselves actually have a good article[0] on the topic. Besides, there's way more to CPU performance than clock speed—today's Intel CPUs are several times faster than the Penitum 4, for instance, even at lower frequencies. > @nVidia: how about thinking about affordable high end GPUs? The GPUs got 400% more expensive since 2011. What are you talking about? GPU performance is plateauing a little bit, but the cards are only getting cheaper and more energy efficient, especially the high-end ones. Both Nvidia and AMD have announced new high-end cards coming soon that will give you the performance of the current high-end cards (Titan X and Fury X) at a little over half the price. Edit: Apparently they won't be that much cheaper than previous generations, but certainly within the grasp of any enthusiast or professional who really wants/needs them. Plus, isn't "affordable high end" kind of an oxymoron? "High end" is almost by definition not affordable for most people. [0]: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/02/19/why-has-cpu-frequency-ceased-to-grow https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/02/19/why-has-cp...
- redtuesday 10y ago
  I would guess frik probably means this: in 2010/2011 you had to pay ~350 euros for AMDs 5870 when it launched, or ~450 euros for nvidias GTX 580. Now you have to pay ~700 euros for AMDs Fury X or ~800 euros for nvidias GTX 980ti at launch. That's not 400% more expensive but they are not cheaper either.
  - tgb 10y ago
    In the US, release price of GTX 580 was $500 and release price of the 1080 at launch is $600. Converting the 580's price to 2016 dollars gives about a 10% increase in price. The 980 TI I'm not sure is the best comparison to a GTX 580. It was intentionally a very expensive ultra-high end card. The GTX 590 debuted at $700. There does seem to be a problem with prices being ridiculously high in most non-US regions, though.
_ihaque 10y ago
A humorous take on answering these questions: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/theslowwinter.pdf http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/theslowwinter...
- rlonstein 10y ago
  Everything by James Mickens seems to humorously puncture research. Take his essay The Saddest Moment, https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login-logout_1305_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login-logout_1305_micken..., which had me laughing out loud because I've attended just that kind of conference talk, seen that set of diagrams, and I swear I've had to coordinate lunch via IM with those kinds of people ;)
  - NikolaNovak 10y ago
    I have found Hacker News to be a very concentrated source of useful material, with a high ratio of "want to read / glad I read" articles. ... but nothing compares, nothing has prepared me, for the sheer awesomeness, of these two links. I now must store the PDFs in a safe repository with GoogleCalendar note to re-read them frequently :->
  - throwaway676565 10y ago
    The man is beyond brilliant. Check out his take on computer security: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF24WHumvIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF24WHumvIc
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
agumonkey 10y ago
I'm curious, what would you do that 10GHz would allow ? IMO the only issue is commercial pressure killing integration. Until Vulkan GPUs were underutilized. Audio drivers lying about hardware capabilities. Software layers ever shifting. Absurd use cases: ads invaded html5, half accelerated html video....

by frik 10y ago

raverbashing 10y ago

MHz/GHz are overrated. Not to mention today's 3GHz Intel and AMD offerings are much faster (per core) than let's say, the 3GHz offerings of 10y (?) ago nVidia got their bets right with investing on uses other than gaming for their GPUs now they're eating AMD/ATI in the deep learning field Affordable and High End are rarely on the same phrase, so there's your answer to when nVidia is going to do that

protomyth 10y ago
MHz/GHz is basically RPM in a car, not the greatest determinate of speed.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Correct Example: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+4+1500MHz https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Pentiu... Other examples: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel,264-18.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel,264-18.html
- squeaky-clean 10y ago
  What a perfect analogy! Next time I'm having this discussion with people, I'll have to remember this.
- hvidgaard 10y ago
  Except that the absolute pinnacle of motorsport go as high as they can because it is what produces the most power. Not that this matter for normal cars.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Sure, some sports car engines turn at over 9,000 RPM, but a car stuck in 1st gear on 9 inch wide street tires is not going to go faster than the same car in 5th with 11.5 inch wide racing tires. Even at the pinnacle of motorsport RPM is a poor determinant of speed, it takes a whole system.
    - hvidgaard 10y ago
      That is true, but at least for engines, it's a fairly safe bet, that if the engines goes beyond 12k rpm, it's build for speed. That said, I suppose this differs depending on wether or not you think of the gearbox as a part of the engine (CPU) or not.
      - protomyth 10y ago
        My analogy was comparing the CPU to a car, so I do consider the gearbox. An engine, no matter how many RPMs it can turn, is pretty useless without the vehicle.
  - slededit 10y ago
    The redline is almost never the point of peak horsepower. This is primarily driven by the fact that the valves can't close/open fast enough at these speeds. Its much worse on domestic vehicles that have to care about fuel efficiency (and so can't use stiffer springs) but the effect is still visible even in race cars.
    - hvidgaard 10y ago
      In F1 the previous generation engines was limited to 18k rpm by the regulations. They could go higher, and since they always went up to the 18k, it's safe to say it provided the most power, otherwise they would have shifted before.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

cfallin 10y ago

> @Intel: how about thinking about 10GHz single core CPUs? They tried that -- the Pentium 4. The key design goal was to push clock speed as high as possible, and they used some crazy tricks, like 30-some-stage pipelines, a really long instruction scheduling loop with a pretty long lookahead, a double-pumped ALU with staggered 16-bit half-adds, etc. Fascinating from a microarchitecture perspective, but the big lesson was that high clock speeds sacrifice efficiency. The tricks needed to get there cause a lot of performance outliers/bad cases too -- e.g. the instruction scheduling replay system on lookahead conflicts was notorious for "tornados" which would kill IPC. And the branch prediction of the day was somewhat suboptimal for the pipeline lengths involved. > Why are we stuck in 2006 era CPU singe core performance? We aren't! The core microarchitecture teams at Intel and their competitors have made a lot of incremental progress -- Intel gets about 15% single-thread performance per generation, for example. No one is evilly scheming and holding back from turning a knob higher. There's just a lot of really hard engineering. Clock speed has topped out due to power limitations so we're at the point of looking for better branch prediction algorithms, cache replacement algorithms, and lots of little tricks everywhere to optimize bad cases. It's hard work (this was my job for a bit). I'd recommend looking at, e.g., the proceedings of ISCA and MICRO conferences in the 2000-2006 timeframe -- this was when the industry and associated academia figured out that chasing clock speed was a losing battle after a certain point.

sirsar 10y ago
What does it mean to have a "double pumped" ALU? Google is failing me.
- cfallin 10y ago
  The ALU performs an operation on half of the machine word (16 of the 32 bits) each half-cycle, i.e., one on the rising edge and one on the falling edge of the clock. Basically they split the carry chain across two (half-)pipe stages and then run it twice as fast. See Hinton et al., "The microarchitecture of the Pentium 4 processor" [1] for all the nifty details -- pp 8-9, and Fig 7 in particular. [1] http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/koren/ece568/papers/Pentium4.pdf http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/koren/ece568/papers/Pentium4.pd...

xyience 10y ago

Atom is no longer needed since their non-atom CPUs have a low enough power profile now. We're stuck in single core performance hell because physics. I don't know where you've been but GPU competition between nvidia and AMD has been pretty healthy for the last few years, and AMDs specifically have been quite affordable. (That's not even taking into account they easily paid for themselves with Litecoin mining at one point.) It's only CPU competition that has been dead, but that's been the case ever since the Core line came out. (I guess you could count ARM too for low-end CPU competition, but both Intel and ARM can actually afford to lose that market entirely as their businesses are propped up by other things.)

paulmd 10y ago
Competition really hasn't been healthy, beginning with the Kepler generation. Ever since then, AMD has been unable to get a solid win, and most of their cards have been rebrands. They're still running some first-gen GCN chips (dating back to 2012) in their current lineup. Heck, some of their prices have actually increased in the last few years (eg the 390 rebrand raised the price by $100). NVIDIA held the upper hand with GK110 (780/Titan), then AMD dropped the 290X. This forced NVIDIA to readjust their prices and release the 780 Ti as an interim measure, but they held onto their lead position. Then NVIDIA started with the Maxwell series, which drastically improved both performance and efficiency. AMD tried to respond to the Titan X with the Fury X, but NVIDIA cut the legs out from under them by releasing the 980 Ti. Now once again AMD is behind the performance curve - NVIDIA has staked out the high-end space with the 1080 and the midrange with the 1070, and AMD is stuck in the low-end market with the RX480 until NVIDIA can get GP106 out. AMD's response to the 1080 is going to be the Vega 10 chip, and unfortunately it's unlikely to be released before Q4 2016 at the earliest (more likely Q1 or Q2 2017). NVIDIA already has GP102 coming down the pipe, which is going to be a Titan/1080 Ti, and they'll drop that when they feel it's necessary to spoil AMD's sales. That's the story of AMD and NVIDIA recently. AMD has put out some cards that were good value for the money - both the 7950/7970 and 290/290X have been very long-lived performers (and will likely continue to perform well thanks to DX12). But they haven't taken the top since 2012, all they can do at this point is force some price reductions. Like it or not they aren't a serious competitor in the GPU space any more than they are in the CPU space. They are a budget choice, not a serious contender.

RussianCow 10y ago

> @Intel: how about thinking about 10GHz single core CPUs? And where is Atom? Why are we stuck in 2006 era CPU singe core performance? Because that's physically impractical (if not impossible) with today's technology. Intel themselves actually have a good article[0] on the topic. Besides, there's way more to CPU performance than clock speed—today's Intel CPUs are several times faster than the Penitum 4, for instance, even at lower frequencies. > @nVidia: how about thinking about affordable high end GPUs? The GPUs got 400% more expensive since 2011. What are you talking about? GPU performance is plateauing a little bit, but the cards are only getting cheaper and more energy efficient, especially the high-end ones. Both Nvidia and AMD have announced new high-end cards coming soon that will give you the performance of the current high-end cards (Titan X and Fury X) at a little over half the price. Edit: Apparently they won't be that much cheaper than previous generations, but certainly within the grasp of any enthusiast or professional who really wants/needs them. Plus, isn't "affordable high end" kind of an oxymoron? "High end" is almost by definition not affordable for most people. [0]: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/02/19/why-has-cpu-frequency-ceased-to-grow https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/02/19/why-has-cp...

redtuesday 10y ago
I would guess frik probably means this: in 2010/2011 you had to pay ~350 euros for AMDs 5870 when it launched, or ~450 euros for nvidias GTX 580. Now you have to pay ~700 euros for AMDs Fury X or ~800 euros for nvidias GTX 980ti at launch. That's not 400% more expensive but they are not cheaper either.
- tgb 10y ago
  In the US, release price of GTX 580 was $500 and release price of the 1080 at launch is $600. Converting the 580's price to 2016 dollars gives about a 10% increase in price. The 980 TI I'm not sure is the best comparison to a GTX 580. It was intentionally a very expensive ultra-high end card. The GTX 590 debuted at $700. There does seem to be a problem with prices being ridiculously high in most non-US regions, though.

_ihaque 10y ago

A humorous take on answering these questions: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/theslowwinter.pdf http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/theslowwinter...

rlonstein 10y ago
Everything by James Mickens seems to humorously puncture research. Take his essay The Saddest Moment, https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login-logout_1305_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login-logout_1305_micken..., which had me laughing out loud because I've attended just that kind of conference talk, seen that set of diagrams, and I swear I've had to coordinate lunch via IM with those kinds of people ;)
- NikolaNovak 10y ago
  I have found Hacker News to be a very concentrated source of useful material, with a high ratio of "want to read / glad I read" articles. ... but nothing compares, nothing has prepared me, for the sheer awesomeness, of these two links. I now must store the PDFs in a safe repository with GoogleCalendar note to re-read them frequently :->
- throwaway676565 10y ago
  The man is beyond brilliant. Check out his take on computer security: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF24WHumvIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF24WHumvIc
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

agumonkey 10y ago

I'm curious, what would you do that 10GHz would allow ? IMO the only issue is commercial pressure killing integration. Until Vulkan GPUs were underutilized. Audio drivers lying about hardware capabilities. Software layers ever shifting. Absurd use cases: ads invaded html5, half accelerated html video....