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As much perhaps not, quite a lot still though but I simply don't care anymore. I copied 153Gb of data onto my laptop earlier over my fiber connection because t

As much perhaps not, quite a lot still though but I simply don't care anymore. I copied 153Gb of data onto my laptop earlier over my fiber connection because the project I'm working on needs it and I couldn't be bothered to go find the external drive with it on in the storage closet in the 2nd bedroom. I can buy 500GB of really fast m2 SSD for 153 quid (approximately 30p per GB) or terabytes of storage for 153 quid. I got a new thinkpad a few weeks ago, I specced it with 16GB on one slot because I fully intend to upgrade to 32GB fairly soon with virtualisation I can bump up against 16GB, Let that sink in, My time is so precious (to me on my machines and my employer on theirs) that I'm happy to virtualise entire operating systems and allocate billions of bytes of memory and storage to save some of it. Hardware is absurdly cheap and I can't really see that changing for a while, from a systemic point of view it's ridiculously more efficient to spend a lot of money in a few places (Intel, Samsung, IBM etc) than to spend a lot of money in every place. Every time Intel puts out a processor that is 10% faster at the same price everyone elses software just got 10% faster for free* (*where free = the price of the new processor). There just isn't a market incentive (financial or otherwise) to rollback bloat, if there where it would be a competitive advantage and everyone would be doing it, that they aren't shows that it isn't. I suspect a lot of the reason why Linux installs stayed so relatively lean was because for a long time most people had CD burners not DVD burners, once those where common install ISO's blew right past 650Mb, I think Fedora 26's was 1.3Gb, I didn't really pay any attention.

hyperpallium 9y ago
So, even without Moore's law, it's better to improve percentage efficiencies at a few highly leveraged points, rather than at every point. A percentage improvement in the processor, gives improvement for all customers, and for all layers of their stack, all parts of their software, every line of code: OS, DB, language, stdlibs, third-party libraries, in-house libraries, yesterday's code, code you're writing write now. I unpack that so much to show how much benefit it gives, and that, perhaps even a tiny percentage benefit... 1%? 0.1? 0.001? etc? ... might still be a win...
quickben 9y ago
Latest Intel CPUs got 1-3% faster, not 10%. In any case, that is irrelevant as 14nm and ipc are pretty much maxed out, and from this point on, this is it. Unless CPUs move away from silicone, this is as fast as it gets (save for adding cores to the problem).
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Yes and no, I built a Ryzen 1700 desktop for work, that processor cost about the same as the K i5 I bought a few years ago (adjusting for the pound cratering). On multithreaded workloads that I care about its not just a little faster, it's a lot faster. There is still a lot of fruit to be had in that direction I think and that's before you consider the other areas left for performance improvement. Of course for some workloads/people they are already butting up against a different cost/benefit and they do care about ekeing every cycle out the processor but for me it hardly matters. My desktop at work runs a development version of our main system faster under vagrant than it runs in production since I've got more RAM and a machine with twice as many cores. It's a strange market when that happens..
  - quickben 9y ago
    :) I'm in the same boat. Built a 1700x with 32gb for my home workstation. Feels lot faster than the 4670k it replaced. I suspect most of that is the ddr4 + another 4 cores + nvme , rather than IPC gains. I like the direction the CPUs moved, although after 7nm in few years, they'll have to redesign a lot more than CPUs to get anything substantial out of it. We'll see, exciting times otherwise.

hyperpallium 9y ago

So, even without Moore's law, it's better to improve percentage efficiencies at a few highly leveraged points, rather than at every point. A percentage improvement in the processor, gives improvement for all customers, and for all layers of their stack, all parts of their software, every line of code: OS, DB, language, stdlibs, third-party libraries, in-house libraries, yesterday's code, code you're writing write now. I unpack that so much to show how much benefit it gives, and that, perhaps even a tiny percentage benefit... 1%? 0.1? 0.001? etc? ... might still be a win...

quickben 9y ago

Latest Intel CPUs got 1-3% faster, not 10%. In any case, that is irrelevant as 14nm and ipc are pretty much maxed out, and from this point on, this is it. Unless CPUs move away from silicone, this is as fast as it gets (save for adding cores to the problem).

noir_lord 9y ago
Yes and no, I built a Ryzen 1700 desktop for work, that processor cost about the same as the K i5 I bought a few years ago (adjusting for the pound cratering). On multithreaded workloads that I care about its not just a little faster, it's a lot faster. There is still a lot of fruit to be had in that direction I think and that's before you consider the other areas left for performance improvement. Of course for some workloads/people they are already butting up against a different cost/benefit and they do care about ekeing every cycle out the processor but for me it hardly matters. My desktop at work runs a development version of our main system faster under vagrant than it runs in production since I've got more RAM and a machine with twice as many cores. It's a strange market when that happens..
- quickben 9y ago
  :) I'm in the same boat. Built a 1700x with 32gb for my home workstation. Feels lot faster than the 4670k it replaced. I suspect most of that is the ddr4 + another 4 cores + nvme , rather than IPC gains. I like the direction the CPUs moved, although after 7nm in few years, they'll have to redesign a lot more than CPUs to get anything substantial out of it. We'll see, exciting times otherwise.