4 ms·
So about 400,000X faster than my first computer console, the 8bit 1Mhz Atari 2600, which cost $200 at that, time 40 years ago. Or 600X faster than the 64-bit 80
by riazrizvi 7y ago
So about 400,000X faster than my first computer console, the 8bit 1Mhz Atari 2600, which cost $200 at that, time 40 years ago. Or 600X faster than the 64-bit 80 MHz Cray-1 which was $8mm at the same time.
- ahefner 7y agoThe Atari ST was 16-bit and ran around 7 or 8 MHz. Maybe you're thinking of the 8-bit line (400/800/XL/XE).
- riazrizvi 7y agowas thinking 2600 and typing ST, fixed it
- sixothree 7y agoMy first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer with 4KB. The pace of doubling has been a part of my life since home pong. And now a generation provides <20% boost over the previous leaves me with an uneasy feeling.
- riazrizvi 7y agoI get excited as much about economic and eco-political axes in technology, with this multidimensional perspective there is still so much room to grow. Look at how interesting OS's became when Richard Stallman started to open source them. Look at the price difference between the Atari and Cray in terms of $/speed, albeit a 70's example. Chips are still in patent-impregnable territory, they are proprietary and boring. In the next years, if these technologies open up, we could see some amazing stuff...
- sixothree 6y agoI am excited mostly about AR. _If_ we can solve the hardware, it promises to be one of the most useful and astounding technologies ever promised.
- moonchild 7y agoFrequency is no longer a good proxy for speed, what with advancements in ipc. Also, note that the amount of memory in a cray-1 is similar (within 1-2 orders of magnitude) to the amount of cache in a modern cpu.
- wahern 7y agoFrequency is still very much a good proxy for speed, especially in the context of a chip which has the same deep pipelines and sophisticated scheduling that made "frequency is no longer a good proxy for speed" a popular retort. The benefits of improved IPC are dwarfed by the frequency gains as compared to those older chips.
- moonchild 7y agoNot really. Straight FLOPS might increase pretty-much linearly, but that's not representative of a typical workload. Cache latency (as measured in clock cycles) and size in a modern core is comparable to memory in an older CPU, as I mention in the parent. But speculative execution means you can effectively use the 'slower' medium (memory) for intermediate computation.
- corysama 7y agohttps://unfoxnews.com/clocking-a-6502-to-15ghz/ https://unfoxnews.com/clocking-a-6502-to-15ghz/ tldr: 6502 is very similar to 8086 and doing a binary translation is fairly straightforward. But, it turns out that many instructions that took multiple cycles on the 6502 now execute in a single cycle on x64 and pipeline deeply with other ops. So, the effective performance of a 4Ghz x64 resembles that of a 15Ghz 6052.
- moonchild 7y agoTo clarify, the problem is not 'clocks give X% improvement to performance, but architectural improvements give Y%, and Y is bigger than you give it credit for.' The problem is that CPU performance is not practical to reason about for humans. Hasn't been and probably won't ever be until/unless computers get massively rearchitectured. The speed-of-light limit means that 'fast' memory (accessible within a couple of clock cycles) will always be limited, and 'big' memory (gigabytes-terabytes size) will always be at least 100 cycles delayed. This in turn means that the cpu architecture must be asynchronous, which means it does not have consistent or intuitive performance characteristics.
- Symmetry 7y agoAnd the CPU in your Atari might have to chew over an instruction for several clock cycles while a modern CPU will often be able to sustain multiple instruction per cycle in good stretches of code.