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> Having a billion transistors is not 10 times as useful as 100 million transistors. The diminishing return kicked in even before that. I think this is far mor
by dwaltrip 9y ago
> Having a billion transistors is not 10 times as useful as 100 million transistors. The diminishing return kicked in even before that.
I think this is far more difficult to evaluate than your comment admits.
More transistors -> more software that can do more things, written by developers with a wider range of skills, in a society with increased tech permeation, and so on...
- julian_1 9y agoI don't think that's entirely clear. At least for cpus, less transistors in practice means you get rid of super-scalar architectures, and over-engineered microcode decoding and branch-prediction units. This leads to a modest reduction in processing speed with far larger gains in battery life for mobile devices (think X86 versus Arm). Client side applications are mostly unaffected in terms of end-user functionality.
- Retric 9y agoFirst change is smaller cache, then fewer cores. Pentium 4 Willamett had 44 million transistors and a long pipeline etc. 8 core Ryzen on the other hand is 4,800 million.
- Retric 9y agoThe trade off is usually ~same functionality but better graphics. Compare Office 1997 with Office 2017 and the average user sees a very modest improvement relative to how much better of a computer you need.
- marpstar 9y agoAnother thing is that users also have a lot more applications running in the background, calling servers, caching data, disk I/O.