6 ms·

Well actually I think it's more a case of "increase in performance is becoming harder and harder, the technology leader (Intel) is slowly becoming stuck and the

by kakwa_ 9y ago

Well actually I think it's more a case of "increase in performance is becoming harder and harder, the technology leader (Intel) is slowly becoming stuck and the competition (AMD) is catching up". Everybody will be more or less at the same level as it requires huge investments to only get a marginal advantage. Apart from games, I would not be that afraid to install recent pieces of software (browser, office suit, os) on a 10 years old computer (2007 core 2 duo). But in 2007 I would not have thought for a minute that I could do the same on a 1997 computer (Pentium II), and installing 1997 software on a 1987 computer (80386), just no. Last time I replaced my CPU (i5-6500 in place of i5-2500), I only saw a marginal improvement. Even at my former job, I worked with some decent servers (32 to 48 cores, 128GB of RAMs) to build Linux masters from scratch (Gentoo based). The oldest server of the bunch (which is 5 years old now) is still the fastest to build a master from scratch, it has less cores but faster clock and even on parallel tasks like compiling stuff, clock is still a more determining factor than cores. There are still tons of things to improve in CPUs: power consumption, cost, embedded functionalities (SoC)... but performance improvements seem a huge cost for low gains adventure right now and for the foreseeable future.

std_throwaway 9y ago
Gains in instructions-per-clock start to flatten out. And that's where the gains were coming from in the last years. Some time ago a paper was posted here that showed how even if you have an infinite amount of transistors, you will still be limited in the range of 3-10 instructions-per-clock for typical programs. Clock speeds seem to have leveled and IPC will only see another gain of 50-100%. Single threaded performance is close to the limit. What after that? Is this the end?
- ido 9y ago
  When was the last time we saw a 50-100% performance gain in cars? airplanes? spacecraft? Was it the end of those industries? Welcome to mature technology.
  - meric 9y ago
    > spacecraft Economically? I think this or last year.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Economically, SpaceX is about 3% cheaper than Arianespace. That's not a 50% or 100% improvement. Maybe they'll get that improvement once they run recycled rockets all the time, but not before that.
      - mlvljr 9y ago
        Will anyone debunk the above? :)
      - kuschku 9y ago
        @mlvljr: Your account seems to be shadowbanned, I can’t reply to your comment. Currently, SpaceX has prices around 56-62 million USD per launch of a normal satellite (with a weight and orbit where they can recover the first stage). Arianespace launches such lighter satellites in pairs, always two at once, at a price of around 60 million USD per satellite. The Chinese launchers offer the same at around 70 million USD per launch. So, the prices aren’t that different. But, for launches from reused rockets, SpaceX is damn cheap. The first launch on a reused rocket cost below 30 million USD. So, to recap: Today, in best case, SpaceX is between 4 and 13% cheaper than the next competitor. But in a few years, once they launch mostly reused rockets, they’ll be around 50 to 60% cheaper than the next competitor.
        njarboe 9y ago
        I imagine that, while SpaceX will continue to improve their cost/kg to orbit and reach a launch expense of half the current cost with re-usables pretty quickly, until someone else can compete, they could just increase their profit per launch enormously. Musk needs some serious capital for his Mars plans. I hope his global satellite internet provider concept works (I can't wait to have a option other than AT&T or Comcast) and brings in the big bucks. Then he won't need to make money on launches and can drop the launch price on launches to close to cost to help all space activities. Maybe even start selling re-usable rockets to other launch companies. Can't wait to see that day. Long term, Musk is shooting for a ~100x reduction in launch costs to make a Mars colony feasible. Hope he makes it.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  GPUs: http://michaelgalloy.com/2013/06/11/cpu-vs-gpu-performance.html http://michaelgalloy.com/2013/06/11/cpu-vs-gpu-performance.h... http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/... This is behind much of the interest in machine learning these days. Deep learning provides a way to approximate any computable function as the composition of matrix operations with non-linearities. It does this at the cost of requiring many, many times the computing power. But much of this computing cost can be parallelized and accelerated effectively on the GPU, so with GPU cores still increasing exponentially, at some point it's likely to become more effective than CPUs.
  - dom0 9y ago
    I don't think GPUs are a particularly good solution for these, they aren't the future and won't be around for mass-deployment that much longer.
    - heavenlyblue 9y ago
      It seems the author is down the 'deep learning' rabbit hole. >> It does this at the cost of requiring many, many times the computing power. But much of this computing cost can be parallelized and accelerated effectively on the GPU, so with GPU cores still increasing exponentially, at some point it's likely to become more effective than CPUs. So can be any matrix. Sadly, there aren't as many algorithms that are efficiently represented by one.
    - chillydawg 9y ago
      That's quite a statement - what will replace GPUs for the ever increasing amount of ML work being done?
      - bitL 9y ago
        TPU-like chips; though they can be (partially) included on GPUs as well as is the case with the latest NVidia/AMD GPUs.
- rphlx 9y ago
  > Gains in instructions-per-clock start to flatten out. And that's where the gains were coming from in the last years. This is commonly claimed but it's actually false for x86_64 desktop parts. For a single core scalar integer workload the IPC boost from i7-2700k to i7-7700k was maybe 20-25% on a great day, but the base frequency increase was a further 20%, and max boost freq increase ~15%. The frequency increase is of similar importance as the IPC increase.
- Boothroid 9y ago
  Memory and storage. Still big gains to be had there. Imagine if your whole hard drive was RAM speed. Also more specialised cores e.g. DSP, and customisable hardware i.e. FPGA.
  - dr_zoidberg 9y ago
    I distinctly remember a benchmark (which my google-fu is currently unable to find) between Intel chips with and without the Iris chip. On similar conditions (clock base/turbo and core count), the Iris chip had about a 20% performance advantage. It wasn't explained in the benchmark, but the only reason I could imagine was the Iris chip worked as an L4 cache because the benchmark was not doing graphics stuff. That is what the Iris chip does, it sits right there in the socket with a whole bunch of memory available for the iGPU or work as L4 cache if available. It's also a great way to do (almost) zero cost transfers from main memory to (i)GPU memory -- you'd do it at the latency of the L3/L4 boundary. With intel, that unlocks a few GFLOPs of processing power -- in theory, your code would have to be adapted to work this in a reasonable way, of course. To sum things up, I agree with you, memory is a path that holds big speedups for processors. Don't know if "the Iris way" is the best path, but it indeed showed promise. Shame that Intel decided to lock it up for the ultrabook processors mostly.
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      I think the end point will be a massive chip with fast interconnects and a (relatively) huge amount of on die memory talking over a fast bus to something like nvme on steroids. My new Thinkpad has nvme and the difference is huge compared to my very fast desktop at work which has SATA connected SSD's.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  > Some time ago a paper was posted here that showed how even if you have an infinite amount of transistors, you will still be limited in the range of 3-10 instructions-per-clock for typical programs. Do you know what papers that was? I would have thought that with infinite transistors you could speculatively execute all possible future code paths and memory states at the same time and achieve speedup that way.
  - twoodfin 9y ago
    Oldie but goodie: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-93-6.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-93-6.pdf Speculation can only take you so far. How do you speculatively execute something like: a = a + b[x]; ? You can't even speculatively fetch the second operand until you have real values for b and x. Trying to model all possible values explodes so much faster than all possible control paths that it's only of very theoretical interest.
- jimbokun 9y ago
  Isn't this an even further argument for cloud computing? If cost savings all come from having more cores at the same price, but end user devices can't put all those cores to work, having more of the compute intensive work happen on the back end amortized over many end users seems like the only way to benefit from improvements in cores per chip.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  It's not the end, if we as software developers can stop counting on the hardware folks to improve performance and do the hard work necessary to parallelize our apps. (This includes migrating components to use SIMD and/or GPUs as appropriate.)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
willtim 9y ago
> There are still tons of things to improve in CPUs: power consumption, cost, embedded functionalities (SoC) Don't forget bugs! We have had buggy silicon, microcode and drivers, all of which probably still need fixing.
nolok 9y ago
> Apart from games, I would not be that afraid to install recent pieces of software (browser, office suit, os) on a 10 years old computer (2007 core 2 duo). Ah, I can answer that one for you: my work computer of that time (E6850, 8 GB RAM), which cost me less than a thousand euros to build back then, has since been reconverted as a work computer for one of my employee, running Windows 10, Office 2016 and Chrome all day long. Only addition has been a 120GB SSD. It runs much better than the "modern" and "cheap" ~ 400 euros integrated work computer I bought from ASUS and HP in 2015.
- bwat49 9y ago
  yep, an SSD and perhaps more ram is the only upgrade most machines need these days. I'd rather use an old machine that's been upgraded with an SSD than a brand new machine that only has a mechanical hdd
bluedino 9y ago
Apart from games, I would not be that afraid to install recent pieces of software (browser, office suit, os) on a 10 years old computer (2007 core 2 duo). But in 2007 I would not have thought for a minute that I could do the same on a 1997 computer (Pentium II), and installing 1997 software on a 1987 computer (80386), just no. People like to say a Core 2 Duo can still hang, and while it might be okay for basic tasks (and you could use a 10 years old computer in 2007 for basic tasks like word processing, internet), modern PC's are much faster. On benchmarks you're going to be 4-6x faster on most tasks with a 2017 Macbook Pro compared to a 2007, and then don't even get started with anything that takes advantage of SIMD or GP workloads. The other reason people say they can use a 10 year old PC today is because they've upgraded it. Early Core 2 Duo systems shipped with 512MB or 1GB RAM. They came with very slow 80GB hard drives. Upgrading to an SSD and 4-6GB of RAM is a must.
- spamizbad 9y ago
  FWIW The technology that often makes older computers more tolerable these days tends to be the SSDs. I have a mid-2009 MBP with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD that I still use for light duty web browsing and as a DAW in my little hobby studio.
- kakwa_ 9y ago
  Well, I'm not denying that, I'm exactly in that situation for my laptop: 2007 thinkpad x61, core 2 duo T7100, but with 4GB of RAM and an SSD, to be fair I'm cheating a little as I use Debian+DWM which is lighter than Windows 10. But it holds itself pretty well and CPU limitation will probably not be the reason I change it. The screen resolution (1024x768) will probably be the main motivator. But this only illustrates that there were some improvement because of RAM evoluation (4 to 8 GB or RAM now for average PCs vs 1 to 2 GB back then) and huge improvement because of disk evolution (SSD vs mechanical drives). CPU is far from being the main improvement factor for common usage in the last 10 years.
- compuguy 9y ago
  I agree, these days a Core 2 Duo or a Core 2 Quad is getting long in the tooth. Sandy Lake and beyond are still decent performing chips. Edit: I guess I was ahead of the curve, because my Core 2 Duo box had 2 Gbs of ram out of the box (upgraded to 4 GBs of ram later, requiring me to reinstall windows to a 64 bit edition, and then swapping the chip for a Core 2 Quad).
ori_b 9y ago
> Apart from games, I would not be that afraid to install recent pieces of software (browser, office suit, os) on a 10 years old computer (2007 core 2 duo). The only issue I have with my old laptop from around then is browsing the web. Everything else, the performance is fine.
sliverstorm 9y ago
Maybe the gains are running out, but that song has been sung for decades and never proved true yet. It's hard not to look at everything and interpret the marginal gains the past half decade as monopolist laziness/arrogance.
compuguy 9y ago
I believe the last big improvement in power consumption was (at least for Intel) was the 5th generation Haswell chips. What they have been doing is cutting back support on older chips (2nd and 3rd generation specifically).

by kakwa_ 9y ago

std_throwaway 9y ago

Gains in instructions-per-clock start to flatten out. And that's where the gains were coming from in the last years. Some time ago a paper was posted here that showed how even if you have an infinite amount of transistors, you will still be limited in the range of 3-10 instructions-per-clock for typical programs. Clock speeds seem to have leveled and IPC will only see another gain of 50-100%. Single threaded performance is close to the limit. What after that? Is this the end?

ido 9y ago
When was the last time we saw a 50-100% performance gain in cars? airplanes? spacecraft? Was it the end of those industries? Welcome to mature technology.
- meric 9y ago
  > spacecraft Economically? I think this or last year.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Economically, SpaceX is about 3% cheaper than Arianespace. That's not a 50% or 100% improvement. Maybe they'll get that improvement once they run recycled rockets all the time, but not before that.
    - mlvljr 9y ago
      Will anyone debunk the above? :)
    - kuschku 9y ago
      @mlvljr: Your account seems to be shadowbanned, I can’t reply to your comment. Currently, SpaceX has prices around 56-62 million USD per launch of a normal satellite (with a weight and orbit where they can recover the first stage). Arianespace launches such lighter satellites in pairs, always two at once, at a price of around 60 million USD per satellite. The Chinese launchers offer the same at around 70 million USD per launch. So, the prices aren’t that different. But, for launches from reused rockets, SpaceX is damn cheap. The first launch on a reused rocket cost below 30 million USD. So, to recap: Today, in best case, SpaceX is between 4 and 13% cheaper than the next competitor. But in a few years, once they launch mostly reused rockets, they’ll be around 50 to 60% cheaper than the next competitor.
      - njarboe 9y ago
        I imagine that, while SpaceX will continue to improve their cost/kg to orbit and reach a launch expense of half the current cost with re-usables pretty quickly, until someone else can compete, they could just increase their profit per launch enormously. Musk needs some serious capital for his Mars plans. I hope his global satellite internet provider concept works (I can't wait to have a option other than AT&T or Comcast) and brings in the big bucks. Then he won't need to make money on launches and can drop the launch price on launches to close to cost to help all space activities. Maybe even start selling re-usable rockets to other launch companies. Can't wait to see that day. Long term, Musk is shooting for a ~100x reduction in launch costs to make a Mars colony feasible. Hope he makes it.
nostrademons 9y ago
GPUs: http://michaelgalloy.com/2013/06/11/cpu-vs-gpu-performance.html http://michaelgalloy.com/2013/06/11/cpu-vs-gpu-performance.h... http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/... This is behind much of the interest in machine learning these days. Deep learning provides a way to approximate any computable function as the composition of matrix operations with non-linearities. It does this at the cost of requiring many, many times the computing power. But much of this computing cost can be parallelized and accelerated effectively on the GPU, so with GPU cores still increasing exponentially, at some point it's likely to become more effective than CPUs.
- dom0 9y ago
  I don't think GPUs are a particularly good solution for these, they aren't the future and won't be around for mass-deployment that much longer.
  - heavenlyblue 9y ago
    It seems the author is down the 'deep learning' rabbit hole. >> It does this at the cost of requiring many, many times the computing power. But much of this computing cost can be parallelized and accelerated effectively on the GPU, so with GPU cores still increasing exponentially, at some point it's likely to become more effective than CPUs. So can be any matrix. Sadly, there aren't as many algorithms that are efficiently represented by one.
  - chillydawg 9y ago
    That's quite a statement - what will replace GPUs for the ever increasing amount of ML work being done?
    - bitL 9y ago
      TPU-like chips; though they can be (partially) included on GPUs as well as is the case with the latest NVidia/AMD GPUs.
rphlx 9y ago
> Gains in instructions-per-clock start to flatten out. And that's where the gains were coming from in the last years. This is commonly claimed but it's actually false for x86_64 desktop parts. For a single core scalar integer workload the IPC boost from i7-2700k to i7-7700k was maybe 20-25% on a great day, but the base frequency increase was a further 20%, and max boost freq increase ~15%. The frequency increase is of similar importance as the IPC increase.
Boothroid 9y ago
Memory and storage. Still big gains to be had there. Imagine if your whole hard drive was RAM speed. Also more specialised cores e.g. DSP, and customisable hardware i.e. FPGA.
- dr_zoidberg 9y ago
  I distinctly remember a benchmark (which my google-fu is currently unable to find) between Intel chips with and without the Iris chip. On similar conditions (clock base/turbo and core count), the Iris chip had about a 20% performance advantage. It wasn't explained in the benchmark, but the only reason I could imagine was the Iris chip worked as an L4 cache because the benchmark was not doing graphics stuff. That is what the Iris chip does, it sits right there in the socket with a whole bunch of memory available for the iGPU or work as L4 cache if available. It's also a great way to do (almost) zero cost transfers from main memory to (i)GPU memory -- you'd do it at the latency of the L3/L4 boundary. With intel, that unlocks a few GFLOPs of processing power -- in theory, your code would have to be adapted to work this in a reasonable way, of course. To sum things up, I agree with you, memory is a path that holds big speedups for processors. Don't know if "the Iris way" is the best path, but it indeed showed promise. Shame that Intel decided to lock it up for the ultrabook processors mostly.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    I think the end point will be a massive chip with fast interconnects and a (relatively) huge amount of on die memory talking over a fast bus to something like nvme on steroids. My new Thinkpad has nvme and the difference is huge compared to my very fast desktop at work which has SATA connected SSD's.
chrisseaton 9y ago
> Some time ago a paper was posted here that showed how even if you have an infinite amount of transistors, you will still be limited in the range of 3-10 instructions-per-clock for typical programs. Do you know what papers that was? I would have thought that with infinite transistors you could speculatively execute all possible future code paths and memory states at the same time and achieve speedup that way.
- twoodfin 9y ago
  Oldie but goodie: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-93-6.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-93-6.pdf Speculation can only take you so far. How do you speculatively execute something like: a = a + b[x]; ? You can't even speculatively fetch the second operand until you have real values for b and x. Trying to model all possible values explodes so much faster than all possible control paths that it's only of very theoretical interest.
jimbokun 9y ago
Isn't this an even further argument for cloud computing? If cost savings all come from having more cores at the same price, but end user devices can't put all those cores to work, having more of the compute intensive work happen on the back end amortized over many end users seems like the only way to benefit from improvements in cores per chip.
pcwalton 9y ago
It's not the end, if we as software developers can stop counting on the hardware folks to improve performance and do the hard work necessary to parallelize our apps. (This includes migrating components to use SIMD and/or GPUs as appropriate.)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

willtim 9y ago

> There are still tons of things to improve in CPUs: power consumption, cost, embedded functionalities (SoC) Don't forget bugs! We have had buggy silicon, microcode and drivers, all of which probably still need fixing.

nolok 9y ago

> Apart from games, I would not be that afraid to install recent pieces of software (browser, office suit, os) on a 10 years old computer (2007 core 2 duo). Ah, I can answer that one for you: my work computer of that time (E6850, 8 GB RAM), which cost me less than a thousand euros to build back then, has since been reconverted as a work computer for one of my employee, running Windows 10, Office 2016 and Chrome all day long. Only addition has been a 120GB SSD. It runs much better than the "modern" and "cheap" ~ 400 euros integrated work computer I bought from ASUS and HP in 2015.

bwat49 9y ago
yep, an SSD and perhaps more ram is the only upgrade most machines need these days. I'd rather use an old machine that's been upgraded with an SSD than a brand new machine that only has a mechanical hdd

bluedino 9y ago

Apart from games, I would not be that afraid to install recent pieces of software (browser, office suit, os) on a 10 years old computer (2007 core 2 duo). But in 2007 I would not have thought for a minute that I could do the same on a 1997 computer (Pentium II), and installing 1997 software on a 1987 computer (80386), just no. People like to say a Core 2 Duo can still hang, and while it might be okay for basic tasks (and you could use a 10 years old computer in 2007 for basic tasks like word processing, internet), modern PC's are much faster. On benchmarks you're going to be 4-6x faster on most tasks with a 2017 Macbook Pro compared to a 2007, and then don't even get started with anything that takes advantage of SIMD or GP workloads. The other reason people say they can use a 10 year old PC today is because they've upgraded it. Early Core 2 Duo systems shipped with 512MB or 1GB RAM. They came with very slow 80GB hard drives. Upgrading to an SSD and 4-6GB of RAM is a must.

spamizbad 9y ago
FWIW The technology that often makes older computers more tolerable these days tends to be the SSDs. I have a mid-2009 MBP with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD that I still use for light duty web browsing and as a DAW in my little hobby studio.
kakwa_ 9y ago
Well, I'm not denying that, I'm exactly in that situation for my laptop: 2007 thinkpad x61, core 2 duo T7100, but with 4GB of RAM and an SSD, to be fair I'm cheating a little as I use Debian+DWM which is lighter than Windows 10. But it holds itself pretty well and CPU limitation will probably not be the reason I change it. The screen resolution (1024x768) will probably be the main motivator. But this only illustrates that there were some improvement because of RAM evoluation (4 to 8 GB or RAM now for average PCs vs 1 to 2 GB back then) and huge improvement because of disk evolution (SSD vs mechanical drives). CPU is far from being the main improvement factor for common usage in the last 10 years.
compuguy 9y ago
I agree, these days a Core 2 Duo or a Core 2 Quad is getting long in the tooth. Sandy Lake and beyond are still decent performing chips. Edit: I guess I was ahead of the curve, because my Core 2 Duo box had 2 Gbs of ram out of the box (upgraded to 4 GBs of ram later, requiring me to reinstall windows to a 64 bit edition, and then swapping the chip for a Core 2 Quad).

ori_b 9y ago

> Apart from games, I would not be that afraid to install recent pieces of software (browser, office suit, os) on a 10 years old computer (2007 core 2 duo). The only issue I have with my old laptop from around then is browsing the web. Everything else, the performance is fine.

sliverstorm 9y ago

Maybe the gains are running out, but that song has been sung for decades and never proved true yet. It's hard not to look at everything and interpret the marginal gains the past half decade as monopolist laziness/arrogance.

compuguy 9y ago

I believe the last big improvement in power consumption was (at least for Intel) was the 5th generation Haswell chips. What they have been doing is cutting back support on older chips (2nd and 3rd generation specifically).