5 ms·

Comparing modern hardware like this is fine, but kind of pointless. The sad truth is that processing speed improvements have slowed down to a crawl. The expone

Comparing modern hardware like this is fine, but kind of pointless. The sad truth is that processing speed improvements have slowed down to a crawl. The exponential predicted by Moore's law looks more like a shallow linear progression today. Computers are not improving nearly as quickly as they once were. Weirdly, no one is talking about this. If computers stop improving, efficiency will stop improving, which will ultimately mean that standards of living will stop improving. If standards of living stop improving, i.e., the pie stops growing, there could be a whole variety of horrible social and political repercussions as everyone fights for their finite slice.

Veedrac 7y ago
This is actually pretty interesting. The statistic most people noticed is frequency, which climbed exponentially between 1995-2003 and came to a dead stop a year later. https://i.imgur.com/QAEqcie.png https://i.imgur.com/QAEqcie.png However, almost immediately afterwards, IPC, which had been stagnant over that whole time period, started itself steadily climbing exponentially, with the rate falling only fairly slowly. https://i.imgur.com/KiUqMhl.png https://i.imgur.com/KiUqMhl.png The overall result is exponential growth in ST performance that far outlived frequency growth, and which has only truly tapered recently... though it's likely AMD's recent reentry to the market starts to recover trends somewhat. https://i.imgur.com/h2jN9RK.png https://i.imgur.com/h2jN9RK.png But now that IPC is starting to struggle (though not falter), core counts are finally taking off. We haven't hit the end yet.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > But now that IPC is starting to struggle (though not falter), core counts are finally taking off. We haven't hit the end yet. The fact that the industry is now relying on these tricks are actually good evidence that performance is hitting a wall. In the past, if you wanted to 2X boost in performance, you could just wait a year. Now waiting doesn't work. You need to build your own ASIC or move things to the cloud where you can rely on big-tech's economies of scale. We have hit an end, and the performance boosts we see today are one trick ponies. After you build your ASIC, you can't get much faster. After you move to the cloud and reduce processing power costs, you can't reduce further. These tricks have slowed the "perceived" deterioration of Moore's law, but they are acts of desperation, not real progress.
  - mamon 7y ago
    >> You need to build your own ASIC Might be the reason why Intel is putting FPGAs in the latest Xeons: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalable-gold-6138p-with-integrated-fpga-shipping-to-vendors https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalab...
    - speedplane 7y ago
      >> You need to build your own ASIC > Might be the reason why Intel is putting FPGAs in the latest Xeons: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalab.. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalab.... This is an excellent example. As things are trending, I would expect FPGA and other hardware programming to become more common. I would not be surprised if in a few years websites and browsers start doing their own FPGA optimizations. Adding FPGA programmibility does not increase real raw performance, it just allows developers to do optimizations they would not otherwise be able to do. Along this line of thinking, you would expect developers to start moving away from slower scripting languages towards faster compiled languages. This has not happened yet at any large scale, largely because the huge demand of digital services has placed a premium on developer productivity over application speed. However, this trend is happening on the edges (e.g., using C-based Numpy within Python, the steady rise of Go). If computer performance remains as flat as it has been, I predict we'll start seeing more popular libraries rewritten in faster compiled languages (and eventually FPGAs/ASICs) within the next 5 years.
  - pertymcpert 7y ago
    What are you on about? OP was talking about IPC improvements, not cloud BS.
  - Der_Einzige 7y ago
    You don't deserve the downvotes that you are getting. They dislike you because you're right
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      Performance has not hit a wall at all. More transistors was never going to speed up serial processes forever. Transistor count is still increasing, core count is still increasing and software speed usually has room for a 10x-100x speedup in most places since it is usually done so poorly. Most of the time high end games are the only areas where CPUs are actually used to their potential because of memory latency.
- cm2187 7y ago
  Interesting. But core count will probably be barely perceptible by the user. Most real world applications are hard to parallelise, either because the underlying problem is hard, or because the engineering skillset is limited, or because it makes development harder with bugs that are difficult to reproduce and analyse. Either way I don’t think we will be in a world of all algorithms parallelised anytime soon, only some specific widely used applications (video compressing, etc). And even though some languages that are “natively parallel” like erlang, rust, f# etc are attracting interest, the mass of developers is converging on languages that are designed not to be parallelised (python, javascript). So it’s not even a matter of a younger generation of developers is about to come to show us oldies how it’s done.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    I don't see the problem. Almost all consumer workloads are trivial in comparison to video encoding.
  - tssva 7y ago
    But computers don't run a single algorithm at a time. They run a large number of algorithms at the same time. In this scenario increasing core count can increase the number of algorithms truly executing simultaneously which brings tangible benefits the user will notice.
drclau 7y ago
> If computers stop improving, efficiency will stop improving, which will ultimately mean that standards of living will stop improving. If standards of living stop improving, i.e., the pie stops growing, there could be a whole variety of horrible social and political repercussions as everyone fights for their finite slice. I fail to see the connection between the computers’ efficiency and standard of living. You seem to have made quite a big leap there. Can you please elaborate?
- speedplane 7y ago
  > I fail to see the connection between the computers’ efficiency and standard of living. You seem to have made quite a big leap there. Can you please elaborate? It is a big leap, and it's probably better suited for an essay than a HN comment. But the general idea is that most improvements to standard of living have relied on technology, whether that's agriculture (past 5000 years); plumbing and sanitation (past 2000 years); transportation and mass production (past 500 years); or calculation, communication and automation (past 50 years). Humanity has been on an exponential curve of improvement for a hundred years, if not many hundreds. If this exponential in fact turns out to be more of a sigmoid function, and technological development eventually stops, it will have huge repercussions for our entire society. I'm personally not fully convinced we've reached the end, but there are signs that we already have or will soon. Even if you think the chance of this happening is low, the consequences of an end to technological progress is huge. We need technologists, economists, socialists, politicians, and even fiction writers to be investigating this potentiality. The fact that this is not heavily studied is disturbing.
fulafel 7y ago
Do you mean the mainstream press or something like this ? The fading out of single thread performance has been the major topic in computer architecture for a very long time.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > Do you mean the mainstream press or something like this ? The fading out of single thread performance has been the major topic in computer architecture for a very long time. Yes, computer architects have been thinking about this for a while, but so far it's largely stayed in their domain. Everyone else keeps thinking the "nerds" will keep on doing their thing and progress will continue exponentially as it has for the past 50-100 years. But what if that exponential stops, what if it's a sigmoid and not an exponential at all? We need folks outside of the computer industry to consider this possible outcome.
pdpi 7y ago
IIRC, Moore’s law was about transistor count. We’ve historically put those transistors to specific uses that have since become dead ends, but we haven’t run out of ideas of what to do with them yet.

Veedrac 7y ago

This is actually pretty interesting. The statistic most people noticed is frequency, which climbed exponentially between 1995-2003 and came to a dead stop a year later. https://i.imgur.com/QAEqcie.png https://i.imgur.com/QAEqcie.png However, almost immediately afterwards, IPC, which had been stagnant over that whole time period, started itself steadily climbing exponentially, with the rate falling only fairly slowly. https://i.imgur.com/KiUqMhl.png https://i.imgur.com/KiUqMhl.png The overall result is exponential growth in ST performance that far outlived frequency growth, and which has only truly tapered recently... though it's likely AMD's recent reentry to the market starts to recover trends somewhat. https://i.imgur.com/h2jN9RK.png https://i.imgur.com/h2jN9RK.png But now that IPC is starting to struggle (though not falter), core counts are finally taking off. We haven't hit the end yet.

speedplane 7y ago
> But now that IPC is starting to struggle (though not falter), core counts are finally taking off. We haven't hit the end yet. The fact that the industry is now relying on these tricks are actually good evidence that performance is hitting a wall. In the past, if you wanted to 2X boost in performance, you could just wait a year. Now waiting doesn't work. You need to build your own ASIC or move things to the cloud where you can rely on big-tech's economies of scale. We have hit an end, and the performance boosts we see today are one trick ponies. After you build your ASIC, you can't get much faster. After you move to the cloud and reduce processing power costs, you can't reduce further. These tricks have slowed the "perceived" deterioration of Moore's law, but they are acts of desperation, not real progress.
- mamon 7y ago
  >> You need to build your own ASIC Might be the reason why Intel is putting FPGAs in the latest Xeons: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalable-gold-6138p-with-integrated-fpga-shipping-to-vendors https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalab...
  - speedplane 7y ago
    >> You need to build your own ASIC > Might be the reason why Intel is putting FPGAs in the latest Xeons: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalab.. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalab.... This is an excellent example. As things are trending, I would expect FPGA and other hardware programming to become more common. I would not be surprised if in a few years websites and browsers start doing their own FPGA optimizations. Adding FPGA programmibility does not increase real raw performance, it just allows developers to do optimizations they would not otherwise be able to do. Along this line of thinking, you would expect developers to start moving away from slower scripting languages towards faster compiled languages. This has not happened yet at any large scale, largely because the huge demand of digital services has placed a premium on developer productivity over application speed. However, this trend is happening on the edges (e.g., using C-based Numpy within Python, the steady rise of Go). If computer performance remains as flat as it has been, I predict we'll start seeing more popular libraries rewritten in faster compiled languages (and eventually FPGAs/ASICs) within the next 5 years.
- pertymcpert 7y ago
  What are you on about? OP was talking about IPC improvements, not cloud BS.
- Der_Einzige 7y ago
  You don't deserve the downvotes that you are getting. They dislike you because you're right
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    Performance has not hit a wall at all. More transistors was never going to speed up serial processes forever. Transistor count is still increasing, core count is still increasing and software speed usually has room for a 10x-100x speedup in most places since it is usually done so poorly. Most of the time high end games are the only areas where CPUs are actually used to their potential because of memory latency.
cm2187 7y ago
Interesting. But core count will probably be barely perceptible by the user. Most real world applications are hard to parallelise, either because the underlying problem is hard, or because the engineering skillset is limited, or because it makes development harder with bugs that are difficult to reproduce and analyse. Either way I don’t think we will be in a world of all algorithms parallelised anytime soon, only some specific widely used applications (video compressing, etc). And even though some languages that are “natively parallel” like erlang, rust, f# etc are attracting interest, the mass of developers is converging on languages that are designed not to be parallelised (python, javascript). So it’s not even a matter of a younger generation of developers is about to come to show us oldies how it’s done.
- imtringued 7y ago
  I don't see the problem. Almost all consumer workloads are trivial in comparison to video encoding.
- tssva 7y ago
  But computers don't run a single algorithm at a time. They run a large number of algorithms at the same time. In this scenario increasing core count can increase the number of algorithms truly executing simultaneously which brings tangible benefits the user will notice.

drclau 7y ago

> If computers stop improving, efficiency will stop improving, which will ultimately mean that standards of living will stop improving. If standards of living stop improving, i.e., the pie stops growing, there could be a whole variety of horrible social and political repercussions as everyone fights for their finite slice. I fail to see the connection between the computers’ efficiency and standard of living. You seem to have made quite a big leap there. Can you please elaborate?

speedplane 7y ago
> I fail to see the connection between the computers’ efficiency and standard of living. You seem to have made quite a big leap there. Can you please elaborate? It is a big leap, and it's probably better suited for an essay than a HN comment. But the general idea is that most improvements to standard of living have relied on technology, whether that's agriculture (past 5000 years); plumbing and sanitation (past 2000 years); transportation and mass production (past 500 years); or calculation, communication and automation (past 50 years). Humanity has been on an exponential curve of improvement for a hundred years, if not many hundreds. If this exponential in fact turns out to be more of a sigmoid function, and technological development eventually stops, it will have huge repercussions for our entire society. I'm personally not fully convinced we've reached the end, but there are signs that we already have or will soon. Even if you think the chance of this happening is low, the consequences of an end to technological progress is huge. We need technologists, economists, socialists, politicians, and even fiction writers to be investigating this potentiality. The fact that this is not heavily studied is disturbing.

fulafel 7y ago

Do you mean the mainstream press or something like this ? The fading out of single thread performance has been the major topic in computer architecture for a very long time.

speedplane 7y ago
> Do you mean the mainstream press or something like this ? The fading out of single thread performance has been the major topic in computer architecture for a very long time. Yes, computer architects have been thinking about this for a while, but so far it's largely stayed in their domain. Everyone else keeps thinking the "nerds" will keep on doing their thing and progress will continue exponentially as it has for the past 50-100 years. But what if that exponential stops, what if it's a sigmoid and not an exponential at all? We need folks outside of the computer industry to consider this possible outcome.

pdpi 7y ago

IIRC, Moore’s law was about transistor count. We’ve historically put those transistors to specific uses that have since become dead ends, but we haven’t run out of ideas of what to do with them yet.