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> It's not just computers that have been improving like crazy. Personally I feel like advances in computers have been creeping along at best in the last ~five

• sliken 10y ago
  Yeah, seems like Intel's been cruising easy. Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby lake have been pretty small increments for general purpose computing. Does seem like AMD has scared Intel into over drive. Seems like all price points are likely going to get significantly more cores in the next generation after stagnating for what a decade? The normal high end desktop has been quad core since way back at the Q6600 in 2007. Desktops with 8 cores/16 threads and servers with 32 cores/64 threads seems to be Intel's answer to AMD's Zen. Here's hoping AMD delivers on promises and is competitive.
  • monk_e_boy 10y ago
    I think Nvidia with their 512 core Xavier chip is also taking some of Intels thunder. I wonder how long before bits of linux are running on the GPU? Once the process of porting to GPU more and more code will run there.
    • dom0 10y ago
      I very much doubt that. Of course someone might do it for kicks, but not for serious use; GPUs already have a task scheduler built into them, and compute cores don't like branching code - less so if it only needs a couple cores, like a general-purpose OS. There is little reason to waste them (and compromise efficiency) for Linux or any other OS.
  • EvilTerran 10y ago
    > Does seem like AMD has scared Intel into over drive. Seems like all price points are likely going to get significantly more cores in the next generation after stagnating for what a decade? Another factor might be that the software industry is finally adapting to multi-core being the new normal. I mean sure, server software's been forking or multi-threading for ages, but I get the impression the bulk of desktop software did most of its work in a single thread until fairly recently - so having more than 2-4 cores wasn't really worth it, it would just have increased cost without making things feel that much faster for the average user.
    • paulmd 10y ago
      Not only that, but going with more cores hurts in a variety of ways. It's harder to get a wider chip clocked up as far, so single-thread performance tends to suffer. It's hard to manage clocks and scheduling appropriately especially when you have non-uniform processors, like different turbo capability (max multiplier) between cores or even worse big.LITTLE type architectures. It's very easy to end up ping-ponging between high power/low power modes, and battery life suffers. If it were physically possible, it would have been strongly preferable to have just kept increasing clocks instead of going wider. That was a decision made out of necessity, not choice. You see big gains from being able to multitask a little, past that it's really diminishing. All things being equal, a 2C2T or 2C4T at 6+ GHz would be strongly preferable to 4C4T or 4C8T at 4-4.5 GHz for most desktop use. The gains aren't that steep in the real world, of course. The reality is that it's more like a choice between 2C2T at 4.7 GHz (G3258, being a bit gracious here), 4C8T at 4.4 GHz (6700K) or 6C12T at 4.1 GHz (5820K). You can push all of those numbers up a little bit farther by pushing the voltage, but that's roughly the shape of things at stock-ish voltages. I diverge from the common wisdom here, given those numbers I think the 50% increase in real cores from jumping to 6C12T justifies a 10% loss in single-thread performance for many users, especially given that they're essentially the same price. In the threaded tasks where Hyperthreading provides gains, the extra cores will really push you ahead. If you're just gaming or browsing, a 4C4T is really all you'll ever need (and realistically many people will be fine with a 2C4T or 2C2T anyway). So the 4C8T are really an awkward in-between to me, I really think it's mostly that people don't realize that the 6700K isn't "top of the line" and there's a whole other enthusiast socket out there. The server market's a little different of course, you can go much wider, but good single-thread performance still beats parallelism in response times. Really wide architectures like Qualcomm's 24-wide ARM server chips still have yet to really prove themselves except in throughput-oriented/latency-insensitive applications (which are the easy gimmie for slow-and-wide designs).
      • dom0 10y ago
        I very much agree with you. Another interesting observation is that, on cache-coherent systems, the maximum possible clock rate also tends to go down as soon as more than one socket is used. > (which are the easy gimmie for slow-and-wide designs) Nowadays they are more of an historical anecdote, but some time ago Sun created the "niagara" line of barrel processors - a technique that is a form of simultaneous multi-threading, like Hyper-Threading, just with 8-16 threads / core. These UltraSparc T1, T2, ... processors held quite some throughput benchmarks - but were obviously not feasible and not meant for general purpose use.
  • masklinn 10y ago
    > Yeah, seems like Intel's been cruising easy. I don't know, their plans have stalled (tick tock is gone and buried), Iris is being killed and their rollouts are complete shit-shows (even ignoring Xeons, there were 9 months between the availability of the first and last Skylake mobile parts). Maybe that was intentional because there's no competition (it's not like AMD is much of an option these days) but that seems a bit odd.
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    • Fr0styMatt88 10y ago
      Where is this idea that Iris Pro is being killed coming from? How likely is it? It just seems strange. They've been touting their Skull Canyon NUC with Iris Pro pretty heavily towards gamers and to be honest at that size, Iris Pro is exactly what I want for a lounge room gaming and 4K movie PC. It just seems like such a shame; why kill Iris Pro when it's just actually becoming desirable?
      • BlackMonday 10y ago
        I hope AMD prodcues something like Skull Canyon when they release their Zen based APU's. If Zen is competitive this should be really nice since the GPU's from AMD are better. Ideally with a higher tier version that uses HBM so the GPU is not held back by the memory bandwith.
        • sliken 10y ago
          Sadly the rumors claim the first gen zen will not be APUs.
      • 10y ago
• dagw 10y ago
  Personally I feel like advances in computers have been creeping along at best in the last ~five year period. Depends which spec you are looking at. While not much has happend with flops/core, flops/Watt has improved dramatically in the low energy space.
  • sulam 10y ago
    This. Current generation laptops are finally fast enough to be my primary developer experience without feeling like I'm sacrificing performance. I'm still sacrificing screen real estate and biomechanical efficiency with the crappy keyboards, but the compute is finally there.
    • Grishnakh 10y ago
      I'm not sacrificing anything. My two big monitors and my IBM Model M keyboard work just great with my laptop, thanks to a docking station.
  • tracker1 10y ago
    Came to say the same... the improvements seen lately have concentrated on power efficiency, one of the few areas where other platforms have an advantage in some scenarios... This has kept the server space rolling over a bit, which is somewhat nice, it's also helped laptop battery life immensely. There's not as much need for true desktops, but I imagine the nuc-class will continue to improve over the next few years. It just depends on your needs... Also, the GTX 1080 is impressive to say the least, and still a bit under-powered in gaming at 4K (which is what is now pushing that space). Encoding to h.265 is still really intensive as well. The use cases where more power is needed are eroding, but there are still a few, and the use cases where the power usage needs to be lower still are many.
• anexprogrammer 10y ago
  To be honest it feels like "advances" in computers have been speed, cores and little else. Ever since the abandonment of the last non-PC platform. It might get interesting again when ARM is directly competing against x86 - but that's due to the advances of handhelds/phones. Lots of cores is all very well, but a lot of applications still can't utilise them that well. The last time computing hardware felt exciting was late 90s, or early 00s when there were half a dozen graphics players, SPARC, PowerPC, 680x0 and the odd strange idea like NeXT, transputers and BeBOXes. That we care more about the case, the interfaces and the coloured LEDs says we're firmly past the innovation era.
  • lmm 10y ago
    > Lots of cores is all very well, but a lot of applications still can't utilise them that well. Right, which is the real issue I think. It's not that we can't make faster computers, it's that we've run out of good software use cases, just like the limiting factor on how good videogames look is no longer how good the engine and rendering are but rather how good the artists can make the textures and models. There is still innovation going on - intel's recent hardware transactional memory support is very exciting - but for the most part we simply already have more CPU capability than we know what to do with.
    • dom0 10y ago
      Probably a more interesting development is secure memory (Intel SGX, AMD SME/SEV), because that has the potential to make virtualisation / cloud offerings far more secure - it effectively allows a VM to enforce that the hyper-visor / service provider cannot read it's memory. Effectively barring the SP from being a few commands away from root on every hosted system.
    • anexprogrammer 10y ago
      That and so much of our computing is now using all that horsepower to play thin client.
    • cr0sh 10y ago
      I think we might see more cores (and other innovations) becoming useful for offline AI/ML purposes, as well as virtual reality applications. Both right now are mostly dependent on GPU cores (the more the merrier), but can be bottlenecked by the CPU usage (depending on the task, of course - games tend to want more of everything). Though both of those might stay niche areas, since most people are moving to mobile devices and any need for more compute power can come from "cloud resources".
• mvindahl 10y ago
  Maybe we simply hit the point where CPUs work well enough to serve their purpose and where the physical tradeoffs make it impractical to extend Moore's law. Proper credit: Maciej's observation, not mine: http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
• abricot 10y ago
  The whole premise of the article relies on people actually wanting to retrofit thinkpads with new backlights - which is directly helped by the slowness of advances in computers.