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We have been over 5ghz for a decade, it just takes ln2 to do it. We aren't going to see ludicrously high clock rates for the foreseeable future. There are a lo
by zanny 9y ago
We have been over 5ghz for a decade, it just takes ln2 to do it.
We aren't going to see ludicrously high clock rates for the foreseeable future. There are a lot of compounding factors as to why, but the biggest ones are the pressure for efficiency driving designs that aren't dumping higher and higher voltage to get frequency, the diminishing returns on voltage vs frequency (see Ryzen, where a 20% improvement in clocks costs about a 50% increase in power draw across all skews, and similar situations happen with Intel).
That being said, a 4ghz Skylake core crushes a 4ghz Core 2 core. Depending on your benchmark used it can perform anywhere from 80% to upwards of 170% faster per clock. You don't get as dramatic year over year improvements increasing the the per cycle performance, but innovations leading up to ~2004 (or 06 for the multicore boon) were just stuffing power hungrier and hotter transistors on smaller dies.
- dom0 9y ago> We have been over 5ghz for a decade, it just takes ln2 to do it. Non-x86 systems went over 5 GHz on air many years ago, e.g. IBM POWER.
- floatboth 9y agoDelidded Kaby Lake also sometimes does 5GHz on air IIRC
- bhouston 9y ago> That being said, a 4ghz Skylake core crushes a 4ghz Core 2 core. Core 2 Duos were slower per clock than Pentium 4s, I think by quite a bit. It was a real set back for performance when they came out.
- YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y agoThat can't obviously be true except for some certainly specific workloads. Core 2 was the breakthrough that left AMD in the dust from which it still hasn't recovered to parity. Even if I can't recall the numbers, I fail to remember how the very energy-intensive (high clocked) Pentium 4 could have been faster per clock. Are you sure you're not thinking of the Pentium 3 to 4 change? After all, Core architecture had more in common with P3, didn't it?