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> Yes, we're kind of stuck on individual CPU power. Clocks have been around 3GHz for a decade now. It's worse than that. A 3GHz version of Northwood was releas
by justin66 9y ago
> Yes, we're kind of stuck on individual CPU power. Clocks have been around 3GHz for a decade now.
It's worse than that. A 3GHz version of Northwood was released a little over fifteen years ago. I doubt it was the first 3GHz processor (that'd be a PPC or something?), but it's definitely symbolic...
- fulafel 9y agoIBM shipped the 4.7/5.0 GHz POWER6s in 2007/2008. (And a 5.2 GHz S/390-arch CPU in 2012 too)
- justin66 9y agoThose are interesting but they're rare exceptions. IBM do these amazing things on super high end chips that very few buy, but the commodity chips that power the PCs and the datacenters of the world (stuck at a little faster than 3GHz, give or take) just don't rely on that stuff very much.
- fulafel 9y agoWell, there isn't a sufficiently big difference between "super high end stuff" and volume parts that it would explain a 10 year lead. Note that the following generation of POWER was clocked lower. Clock frequency != performance.
- justin66 9y agoQuite. The more important example would be Pentium. The main thing that was impressive about Northwood was the clock rate. AMD of the same generation, and the Intel Core processors that followed, did more with a lower clock rate.