5 ms·

CPU performance stagnation has already been the (somewhat unexpected) story of the last decade: Computer have simply become fast enough for almost all users, so

CPU performance stagnation has already been the (somewhat unexpected) story of the last decade: Computer have simply become fast enough for almost all users, so progress has mostly been invested into power saving. Advances have mostly been made in storage speed (SSDs), battery performance, and display quality (resolution, colours, and lately refresh rate), plus vector processing for machine learning.

InclinedPlane 9y ago
I'd add GPUs and RAM sizes to that last. There are a huge number of computing tasks which fall into either the "throw more FPU at it" or the "throw more IO at it" categories. A lot of various techniques have been developed to optimize performance around certain bottlenecks but in the last 10 years we've gotten to a place where FPU cores cost a few cents each and thousands of them can be crammed into a single system, and where hundreds of gigabytes up to several terabytes of RAM are generally affordable and can be equipped into a single system. Going from a system that is hugely IO bound due to data living on spinning disks to a system where a huge multi-gigabyte database can just live in RAM 100% of the time and all other data is stored on SSDs is a several orders of magnitude speedup. And going from "you get one or two FPU ops per clock cycle" to "here's thousands of FPUs per clock cycle" has also translated into orders of magnitude improvements as well. Additionally, software has gotten better. Nginx is just plain much more streamlined than Apache, and simple caching techniques have really increased the amount of boom for your buck you get with hardware these days, at least in the server space.
gambler 9y ago
>Computer have simply become fast enough for almost all users I think this is a misconception. Computers were "fast enough for users" since mid-eighties. Anything is fast enough if you cannot imagine it working better. What happened is that companies came up with more advanced software products for consumers and that drove the demand for faster consumer hardware. The reality is that all the cutting-edge computing today requires a modern $600 GPU. The difference is that in the past we would have expected this kind of hardware to "trickle down" to normal users in couple of years. Today we don't. Instead of marketing better computers companies market cloud services. It's a really shitty phenomenon. We're seeing the reversal of the PC revolution.
- earenndil 9y ago
  > Anything is fast enough if you cannot imagine it working better Exactly. Is memory cheap enough that I can load the entire contents of my hard disk into it at a reasonable price? Is optane (or something similar) cheap enough that syncs from memory back onto something persistent happen at close to realtime? Are processors fast/parallel enough that I can actually start running all the programs I will ever want to run and just switch to them when necessary? Do I have enough cores that even if most of my running processes start glitching out and using 100% cpu, the rest of them will still run buttery smooth? Add to that that resolution of monitors will increase, and details displayed even on lower resolutions will only get more intricate. And things currently on the high-end can only get cheaper.
imtringued 9y ago
We are merely at the beginning of the CPU core arms race. AMD will sell CPUs with at least 12 cores on a single die when 7nm arrives and maybe even up to 16 if we're lucky. EUV is expected to scale to 1 nm at a minimum. It wouldn't surprise me if high end consumer desktops will have 64 cores and servers will have 2x 4x 64 cores for a total of 512 cores per server before the ride finally ends.

InclinedPlane 9y ago

I'd add GPUs and RAM sizes to that last. There are a huge number of computing tasks which fall into either the "throw more FPU at it" or the "throw more IO at it" categories. A lot of various techniques have been developed to optimize performance around certain bottlenecks but in the last 10 years we've gotten to a place where FPU cores cost a few cents each and thousands of them can be crammed into a single system, and where hundreds of gigabytes up to several terabytes of RAM are generally affordable and can be equipped into a single system. Going from a system that is hugely IO bound due to data living on spinning disks to a system where a huge multi-gigabyte database can just live in RAM 100% of the time and all other data is stored on SSDs is a several orders of magnitude speedup. And going from "you get one or two FPU ops per clock cycle" to "here's thousands of FPUs per clock cycle" has also translated into orders of magnitude improvements as well. Additionally, software has gotten better. Nginx is just plain much more streamlined than Apache, and simple caching techniques have really increased the amount of boom for your buck you get with hardware these days, at least in the server space.

gambler 9y ago

>Computer have simply become fast enough for almost all users I think this is a misconception. Computers were "fast enough for users" since mid-eighties. Anything is fast enough if you cannot imagine it working better. What happened is that companies came up with more advanced software products for consumers and that drove the demand for faster consumer hardware. The reality is that all the cutting-edge computing today requires a modern $600 GPU. The difference is that in the past we would have expected this kind of hardware to "trickle down" to normal users in couple of years. Today we don't. Instead of marketing better computers companies market cloud services. It's a really shitty phenomenon. We're seeing the reversal of the PC revolution.

earenndil 9y ago
> Anything is fast enough if you cannot imagine it working better Exactly. Is memory cheap enough that I can load the entire contents of my hard disk into it at a reasonable price? Is optane (or something similar) cheap enough that syncs from memory back onto something persistent happen at close to realtime? Are processors fast/parallel enough that I can actually start running all the programs I will ever want to run and just switch to them when necessary? Do I have enough cores that even if most of my running processes start glitching out and using 100% cpu, the rest of them will still run buttery smooth? Add to that that resolution of monitors will increase, and details displayed even on lower resolutions will only get more intricate. And things currently on the high-end can only get cheaper.

imtringued 9y ago

We are merely at the beginning of the CPU core arms race. AMD will sell CPUs with at least 12 cores on a single die when 7nm arrives and maybe even up to 16 if we're lucky. EUV is expected to scale to 1 nm at a minimum. It wouldn't surprise me if high end consumer desktops will have 64 cores and servers will have 2x 4x 64 cores for a total of 512 cores per server before the ride finally ends.