4 ms·

Except CPUs hit 3ghz back in 2002 and have, in terms of what most of us use, stayed there. The grown in CPU clock cycles has not kept pace with the improvements

by cwyers 8y ago

Except CPUs hit 3ghz back in 2002 and have, in terms of what most of us use, stayed there. The grown in CPU clock cycles has not kept pace with the improvements in CPU speed that have come from superscalar CPU designs and specialized instruction sets. On the timeframes being discussed, it's a comparison that will underrate how much CPUs have changed since then, even on a per-core basis.

snovv_crash 8y ago
We've started doubling, doubling and doubling again the cores and memory bandwidth though, so our dataset size to cpu*ghz would be still comparable. The only thing this doesn't take into account is IPC.
- cwyers 8y ago
  > Fast forward almost 30 years to 2019. A typical commercial cloud VM “core” is a hyperthread of a 2.5Ghz to 3.5Ghz (turbo) physical processor core with 2GB-14GB RAM per core and effectively infinite storage via cloud storage, though local disk might be limited to 64TB or less. Using the same CPU-to-disk ratio as 1990, that 3.5Ghz turbo hyperthread would be paired to 6.6GB of disk (actually, 3.3GB of disk, taking into account the fact that a hyperthread is really only half of a physical core). The author "controls" for the increase in cores, though. This really is a pretty simple point. A modern x86-64 CPU is not just a 386SX running at a higher clock speed. You cannot compare CPUs across decades only on clock speeds. Nothing works like that.
  - romwell 8y ago
    >Nothing works like that. Sure. Thrown in another order of magnitude in to account for that. Heck, throw in two! Why not say that a single 4GhZ CPU core today has a processing power of 100 4GhZ CPU's of yore. You're still orders of magnitude behind the growth of disk space. And that only makes sense for very simple and fast algorithms. Anything super-linear is still very hard with the amounts of data we are able to collect. Which is the author's point.

by cwyers 8y ago

snovv_crash 8y ago

We've started doubling, doubling and doubling again the cores and memory bandwidth though, so our dataset size to cpu*ghz would be still comparable. The only thing this doesn't take into account is IPC.

cwyers 8y ago
> Fast forward almost 30 years to 2019. A typical commercial cloud VM “core” is a hyperthread of a 2.5Ghz to 3.5Ghz (turbo) physical processor core with 2GB-14GB RAM per core and effectively infinite storage via cloud storage, though local disk might be limited to 64TB or less. Using the same CPU-to-disk ratio as 1990, that 3.5Ghz turbo hyperthread would be paired to 6.6GB of disk (actually, 3.3GB of disk, taking into account the fact that a hyperthread is really only half of a physical core). The author "controls" for the increase in cores, though. This really is a pretty simple point. A modern x86-64 CPU is not just a 386SX running at a higher clock speed. You cannot compare CPUs across decades only on clock speeds. Nothing works like that.
- romwell 8y ago
  >Nothing works like that. Sure. Thrown in another order of magnitude in to account for that. Heck, throw in two! Why not say that a single 4GhZ CPU core today has a processing power of 100 4GhZ CPU's of yore. You're still orders of magnitude behind the growth of disk space. And that only makes sense for very simple and fast algorithms. Anything super-linear is still very hard with the amounts of data we are able to collect. Which is the author's point.