11 ms·
When I look at general-purpose single-threaded benchmarks, I see a good progress. I’m pretty sure we’ll see very good progress on that, because Intel/AMD compet
by Const-me 6y ago
When I look at general-purpose single-threaded benchmarks, I see a good progress.
I’m pretty sure we’ll see very good progress on that, because Intel/AMD competition, also because inexpensive SSDs removed the storage bottleneck.
I agree on physical limitations, but the research still goes on, smart people still able to use these extra transistors in a way that’s useful for performance. Even for single-threaded one.
Another thing, software is progressively better at using many cores. It’s much easier to move large pieces of code to another CPU thread (like some browsers do with JS compiler) keeping it sequential code, than it is to re-write code as a large set of small tasks / threads. Many useful algorithms can’t use fine-grained parallelism much, or at all, e.g. streaming stuff like gzip or parsers.
- corysama 6y agoI really miss the 286->Pentium days when you had to buy a new machine every year because it would be literally 50-100% faster at everything. Every year! These days people call a 9% single-thread improvement a good year. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html https://www.karlrupp.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/42-years-processor-trend.png https://www.karlrupp.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/42-years... BTW: Thanks for http://const.me/articles/simd/simd.pdf http://const.me/articles/simd/simd.pdf I came across it recently and posted it to https://www.reddit.com/r/simd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/simd/