4 ms·

Can someone here talk about what desktop CPU's might look like for the consumer in 2029? Like, I'm a gamer in 2029 and I'm looking for the equivalent of todays

by ffwd 7y ago

Can someone here talk about what desktop CPU's might look like for the consumer in 2029? Like, I'm a gamer in 2029 and I'm looking for the equivalent of todays Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen. How much faster will it be? How different will it be from today? Etc.

SECProto 7y ago
I'm a gamer in 2019 and I'm using an i5 2500k processor from 2011. It works well enough for the games I run. I might upgrade if I scrounge up $700 for cpu/mb/ram. The point I'm making is that the processor doesn't matter much for gaming. An older computer can easily outperform a new computer if it has better components where it matters for gaming and casual use (SSD and GPU)
- ffwd 7y ago
  Yeah good point, I shouldn't have mentioned gaming. I guess what I'm looking for is the general desktop workstation situation 10-20 years down the line, rather than gaming specifically. A workstation for visual arts, music, streaming, linux, programming, whatever, and especially if there will be a point in the 2020s or 30s where you'll have long pauses between cpu releases if they don't improve as fast etc.
  - xbmcuser 7y ago
    I think the 10-20 years down the line will see us move back to dumb terminals with servers over the internet. Microsoft has already moved to subscriptions for Windows and office i.e corporate use. And all the major companies are looking at game streaming i.e home use. Education is moving towards chromebooks i.e education. The rest of the uses for PC's like media consumption has already moved to smart devices and smart phone/tablets. So apart from enthusiasts with money to burn on PC's the actual use case for PC's will be gone hence the current form of PC's will be gone.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      Well, when you can put computing power on par with a whole cloud in a single box, which you can nowadays, the equation changes again. Cloud is limited by Amdahl scaling like everyone else, but distances and latencies between nodes are higher than in a single box. So instead you should think of time sharing like in the ancient days of supercomputers. Most tasks do not require neither massive parallelism of a cloud or cluster nor computational resources of a supercomputer. If it's the question of ownership or price... Why not make it free? (Ignore this junk, make libreoffice etc. better.) Just think of it as a PC that gets smaller. You cannot quite go super small unless you replace input and output devices. That will require more understanding of our own sensorium.
  - qes 7y ago
    I'm a developer. I don't spare much expense on my work computer - for example, I sit in front of six QHD IPS panels. I also started on a 286 where you were woefully behind the times if your CPU was more than about a year old. I last upgraded my CPU when it was nearing 6 years old, and I could barely tell the difference. My current CPU is nearing 5 years old, and if it wasn't for some of the enticing stuff AMD's recently put out, a CPU update wouldn't even be on my mind at all yet - in fact I was surprised to recently notice it had been more than 4 years since I last bought a workstation CPU. I expect I'll buy 2 workstation CPU updates between now and 2030, 3 at most. and even that would take something special to drop in the early-to-middle of my normal timeline.
- Causality1 7y ago
  Yeah. My six year old 4670K is over half as fast as a brand new three hundred dollar CPU even without its significant overclock. It's hard to exaggerate how unimpressive the processor gains of the last five years have been.
leetcrew 7y ago
unless something changes dramatically, single-thread performance will probably not be much better, 50-100% speedup at most I'd guess. on the other hand, game developers are only just starting to spread the workload across more than one or two cores. far cry 5 is a pretty unfun game to actually play, but if you look at benchmarks you'll see that it actually gets some decent speedup when you go beyond four cores. ultimately it's still bottlenecked by that one main thread though. if the trend continues, gaming might actually benefit from the current race to cram in as many cores as possible. a final random thought: I wonder if we will start to see big.LITTLE style architectures on x86 desktop parts. maybe 2-4 big cores optimized for very high clocks paired with 16+ smaller, more efficient cores for parallel tasks.
Veedrac 7y ago
Major changes will include the introduction of more 3D packaging, which among others probably means much larger caches. I wouldn't be shocked if last level caches reached, say, half a gigabyte or more, if things go well, though it could certainly not go that well. Depending on how much companies try to milk servers, we should see commoditization of large and fast non-volatile memories. This has many impacts; we might see laptops with hundreds of GB of effective RAM, and filesystems, with appropriate software to handle it, when run from these devices should approach the performance of in-memory data structures. Cores themselves will probably be a fair bit wider, but struggle even more than they currently do to utilize their full throughput. Typical programs will run faster mostly because of the increased cache size and (potentially) vastly faster IO; optimized programs will benefit more from the actual throughput increase. Hopefully chips will have continued increasing their core counts—it's certainly possible, if the will is there. Programmers will follow through after a delay; programming for parallelism is only done when cores are numerous. I could imagine 8 core 24 thread being fairly standard, for instance. GPUs will just continue to get better, as density and memory and packaging allows them to do so. Neural network accelerators will be a lot better than today, and will very much appreciate the larger, faster memories that the future offers. The x86 tax continues to grow as competition from Apple's CPUs (though not necessarily direct competition) results in cores wider than x86 can handle without more and more caching and other expensive optimizations. Mill Computing finally start work on their FPGA.

by ffwd 7y ago

SECProto 7y ago

I'm a gamer in 2019 and I'm using an i5 2500k processor from 2011. It works well enough for the games I run. I might upgrade if I scrounge up $700 for cpu/mb/ram. The point I'm making is that the processor doesn't matter much for gaming. An older computer can easily outperform a new computer if it has better components where it matters for gaming and casual use (SSD and GPU)

ffwd 7y ago
Yeah good point, I shouldn't have mentioned gaming. I guess what I'm looking for is the general desktop workstation situation 10-20 years down the line, rather than gaming specifically. A workstation for visual arts, music, streaming, linux, programming, whatever, and especially if there will be a point in the 2020s or 30s where you'll have long pauses between cpu releases if they don't improve as fast etc.
- xbmcuser 7y ago
  I think the 10-20 years down the line will see us move back to dumb terminals with servers over the internet. Microsoft has already moved to subscriptions for Windows and office i.e corporate use. And all the major companies are looking at game streaming i.e home use. Education is moving towards chromebooks i.e education. The rest of the uses for PC's like media consumption has already moved to smart devices and smart phone/tablets. So apart from enthusiasts with money to burn on PC's the actual use case for PC's will be gone hence the current form of PC's will be gone.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Well, when you can put computing power on par with a whole cloud in a single box, which you can nowadays, the equation changes again. Cloud is limited by Amdahl scaling like everyone else, but distances and latencies between nodes are higher than in a single box. So instead you should think of time sharing like in the ancient days of supercomputers. Most tasks do not require neither massive parallelism of a cloud or cluster nor computational resources of a supercomputer. If it's the question of ownership or price... Why not make it free? (Ignore this junk, make libreoffice etc. better.) Just think of it as a PC that gets smaller. You cannot quite go super small unless you replace input and output devices. That will require more understanding of our own sensorium.
- qes 7y ago
  I'm a developer. I don't spare much expense on my work computer - for example, I sit in front of six QHD IPS panels. I also started on a 286 where you were woefully behind the times if your CPU was more than about a year old. I last upgraded my CPU when it was nearing 6 years old, and I could barely tell the difference. My current CPU is nearing 5 years old, and if it wasn't for some of the enticing stuff AMD's recently put out, a CPU update wouldn't even be on my mind at all yet - in fact I was surprised to recently notice it had been more than 4 years since I last bought a workstation CPU. I expect I'll buy 2 workstation CPU updates between now and 2030, 3 at most. and even that would take something special to drop in the early-to-middle of my normal timeline.
Causality1 7y ago
Yeah. My six year old 4670K is over half as fast as a brand new three hundred dollar CPU even without its significant overclock. It's hard to exaggerate how unimpressive the processor gains of the last five years have been.

leetcrew 7y ago

unless something changes dramatically, single-thread performance will probably not be much better, 50-100% speedup at most I'd guess. on the other hand, game developers are only just starting to spread the workload across more than one or two cores. far cry 5 is a pretty unfun game to actually play, but if you look at benchmarks you'll see that it actually gets some decent speedup when you go beyond four cores. ultimately it's still bottlenecked by that one main thread though. if the trend continues, gaming might actually benefit from the current race to cram in as many cores as possible. a final random thought: I wonder if we will start to see big.LITTLE style architectures on x86 desktop parts. maybe 2-4 big cores optimized for very high clocks paired with 16+ smaller, more efficient cores for parallel tasks.

Veedrac 7y ago

Major changes will include the introduction of more 3D packaging, which among others probably means much larger caches. I wouldn't be shocked if last level caches reached, say, half a gigabyte or more, if things go well, though it could certainly not go that well. Depending on how much companies try to milk servers, we should see commoditization of large and fast non-volatile memories. This has many impacts; we might see laptops with hundreds of GB of effective RAM, and filesystems, with appropriate software to handle it, when run from these devices should approach the performance of in-memory data structures. Cores themselves will probably be a fair bit wider, but struggle even more than they currently do to utilize their full throughput. Typical programs will run faster mostly because of the increased cache size and (potentially) vastly faster IO; optimized programs will benefit more from the actual throughput increase. Hopefully chips will have continued increasing their core counts—it's certainly possible, if the will is there. Programmers will follow through after a delay; programming for parallelism is only done when cores are numerous. I could imagine 8 core 24 thread being fairly standard, for instance. GPUs will just continue to get better, as density and memory and packaging allows them to do so. Neural network accelerators will be a lot better than today, and will very much appreciate the larger, faster memories that the future offers. The x86 tax continues to grow as competition from Apple's CPUs (though not necessarily direct competition) results in cores wider than x86 can handle without more and more caching and other expensive optimizations. Mill Computing finally start work on their FPGA.