3 ms·

> Computers today are closer to 10 times faster than computers of the 90s, not 10,000 times faster like they should be. This isn't even close to true for many

> Computers today are closer to 10 times faster than computers of the 90s, not 10,000 times faster like they should be. This isn't even close to true for many classes of problems. For 3D rendering software running on CPUs, this is observably not true: todays machines are computing 10,000x faster than what was possible in 1994, when Toy Story was rendered. Not to mention massively larger data sets are being rendered now thanks to storage, memory, and general I/O improvements. In fact, path tracing (now the dominant 3D rendering method, including at Pixar) was considered elegant but impractical in the 90s because it required way too many CPU cycles and way too much memory (the whole scene, roughly, needs to be in memory at all times). It took a 1000x (now 10,000x) increase in computer performance across all dimension to make path tracing viable. Does any of that sound like just a roughly 10x improvement in 25 years?

zackmorris 7y ago
I was excluding video cards, and comparing a 1999 computer (say a 300 MHz 1 core Intel Pentium II with 100 MHz RAM) to a 2019 computer (say a 3 GHz 8 core Intel I9 with 1 GHz RAM). There is some wiggle room there on clock and bus speeds and width, but all within a similar order of magnitude: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html This chart doesn’t go as low as we need, but we can extrapolate the Pentium II to a score of about 50 and the I9 to 2500 ( although if we include the I9’s 8 cores, we get a score more like 20,000 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-9900K+%40+3.60GHz&id=3334 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-9900K... ). So we’re looking at about 50x faster single-threaded performance between 1999 and 2019. That means that since 2019 clocks are 10x faster than 1999 clocks, there has been only a 5x performance increase per cycle (most of this probably due to longer pipelines, larger cache and wider busses which are evolutionary rather than revolutionary technologies). Yes, there have been major price decreases. But only minor increases in performance. Computers have exponentially more transistors, but only linearly better processing power and bus speed. Had performance kept up with the 100x increase in transistor count per decade (10,000x every 20 years), The I9 with 8 cores should have scored about 5010,0008 = 4,000,000. But it only scored 20,000, so it’s only reaching about half a percent of its potential performance. We don’t hear any of this talked about much because it’s an inconvenient truth. But from my perspective, Moore’s law ended around 2000. If it was up to me, I would scrap the rat race towards incrementally faster single-threaded performance. One divided by half a percent indicates that chips today should have roughly 8*50 = 400 cores to adequately make use of their potential processing power. For a hardwired (non-FPGA) chipset, I’d reach higher than that and target 1024 cores running at 3 GHz, with as much as 16 GB of on-chip RAM running at 1 GHz (16 MB per core so they can be programmed with local copies of their own operating system), for a chip with roughly the same transistor count as today, and costing under $1000. My training was for designing a MIPS-style chip running at roughly 100 MHz. I don’t see any mystery in designing the scaled-up chip I’m suggesting. In fact, it would be far simpler and cheaper to design because we’d only have to do it once for perhaps a 4-6 stage pipeline with little or no branch prediction or cache logic and then repeat that in a 2D mesh. A single core would run up to 5x slower than an I9’s, but we’d have over 1000 more of them to do whatever we wanted with.
- erichocean 7y ago
  In case I wasn't clear, the kind of 3D rendering I'm describing doesn't use graphics cards. It's all on the CPU. As for ideas to make a faster CPU, sure, knock yourself out. But there's no question that computers today are much closer to 10,000x faster after 25 years of development on actual, real-world code being run to earn billions of dollars. Your approximately 10x faster claim after 25 year is just wrong, at least with the software systems I'm familiar with.
- zackmorris 7y ago
  There is a typo in the above formatting that I can't edit: 5010,0008 = 4,000,000 Should say: 50 * 10,000 * 8 = 4,000,000 That was important to my central point that an I9 has roughly 400 times fewer cores than it would have had it kept up with Moore's law, so I didn't want to leave it unclear.

zackmorris 7y ago

I was excluding video cards, and comparing a 1999 computer (say a 300 MHz 1 core Intel Pentium II with 100 MHz RAM) to a 2019 computer (say a 3 GHz 8 core Intel I9 with 1 GHz RAM). There is some wiggle room there on clock and bus speeds and width, but all within a similar order of magnitude: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html This chart doesn’t go as low as we need, but we can extrapolate the Pentium II to a score of about 50 and the I9 to 2500 ( although if we include the I9’s 8 cores, we get a score more like 20,000 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-9900K+%40+3.60GHz&id=3334 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-9900K... ). So we’re looking at about 50x faster single-threaded performance between 1999 and 2019. That means that since 2019 clocks are 10x faster than 1999 clocks, there has been only a 5x performance increase per cycle (most of this probably due to longer pipelines, larger cache and wider busses which are evolutionary rather than revolutionary technologies). Yes, there have been major price decreases. But only minor increases in performance. Computers have exponentially more transistors, but only linearly better processing power and bus speed. Had performance kept up with the 100x increase in transistor count per decade (10,000x every 20 years), The I9 with 8 cores should have scored about 5010,0008 = 4,000,000. But it only scored 20,000, so it’s only reaching about half a percent of its potential performance. We don’t hear any of this talked about much because it’s an inconvenient truth. But from my perspective, Moore’s law ended around 2000. If it was up to me, I would scrap the rat race towards incrementally faster single-threaded performance. One divided by half a percent indicates that chips today should have roughly 8*50 = 400 cores to adequately make use of their potential processing power. For a hardwired (non-FPGA) chipset, I’d reach higher than that and target 1024 cores running at 3 GHz, with as much as 16 GB of on-chip RAM running at 1 GHz (16 MB per core so they can be programmed with local copies of their own operating system), for a chip with roughly the same transistor count as today, and costing under $1000. My training was for designing a MIPS-style chip running at roughly 100 MHz. I don’t see any mystery in designing the scaled-up chip I’m suggesting. In fact, it would be far simpler and cheaper to design because we’d only have to do it once for perhaps a 4-6 stage pipeline with little or no branch prediction or cache logic and then repeat that in a 2D mesh. A single core would run up to 5x slower than an I9’s, but we’d have over 1000 more of them to do whatever we wanted with.

erichocean 7y ago
In case I wasn't clear, the kind of 3D rendering I'm describing doesn't use graphics cards. It's all on the CPU. As for ideas to make a faster CPU, sure, knock yourself out. But there's no question that computers today are much closer to 10,000x faster after 25 years of development on actual, real-world code being run to earn billions of dollars. Your approximately 10x faster claim after 25 year is just wrong, at least with the software systems I'm familiar with.
zackmorris 7y ago
There is a typo in the above formatting that I can't edit: 5010,0008 = 4,000,000 Should say: 50 * 10,000 * 8 = 4,000,000 That was important to my central point that an I9 has roughly 400 times fewer cores than it would have had it kept up with Moore's law, so I didn't want to leave it unclear.