3 ms·

I've been hearing this for a long time, but the "taper" isn't really a taper in all markets. In consumer markets, yes the taper is very real. Infact I bet you c

I've been hearing this for a long time, but the "taper" isn't really a taper in all markets. In consumer markets, yes the taper is very real. Infact I bet you could take one $500 machine off the shelf of Wal-Mart every year for the past 5 years and benchmark them all within 15% of each other overall. But it isn't really visible when money is no object. If it's not the cores getting faster it's the core-count going up. Moore's Law is really easy to beat if you focus on making your CPU die's larger instead of their transistors smaller.

alkonaut 7y ago
Also for at least one part of high perf computing, gaming, the trend has been that more cores now actually count in modern engines. Couple of years ago you wanted a couple of cores but single thread perf was the big thing. Now some modern game engines scale very well beyond 4 cores. Presumably they have shifted to some sort of work-item based system instead of having fixed threads for subsystems (rendering, AI, ...). So upgrading from a 4 to 8 core a few years back was expensive and mostly not worth it for gaming, whereas now it might actually give the huge speedup the core count would indicate (Obviously for gaming this just means moving the bottleneck, but still)
TheOperator 7y ago
That's just it. The 12 core system years from now will have barely aged. CPUs will just have gotten larger and more expensive. This is changing a past situation where say a CPU would lose half its value in 3 years. This incentivizes spending big and upgrading infrequently.