3 ms·

> 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 n

> 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.

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.