3 ms·
What is Moore's law up to these days? I feel like that, as a user, nothing got faster for about a decade between 2010 and 2020 (not quite right, more like 2012
by jrockway 4y ago
What is Moore's law up to these days? I feel like that, as a user, nothing got faster for about a decade between 2010 and 2020 (not quite right, more like 2012-2018). Instead everyone was like "oh it requires less air conditioners in a data center!" or "uh we're out of ideas, have 32 cores". OK, but I need more FPS from my game. I have a great air conditioner.
That seems to have changed in the last couple years, though. AMD and Apple seem to have gotten serious.
(I know, Moore's law is about transistor count, and I guess adding more cores technically increases the transistor count. But as a software engineer, I need my chips to get 2x faster every 18 months, or I'll have to start using a profiler or something!)
- Symmetry 4y agoIt used to be that when you shrank a transitor you would be able increase clock speeds by default thanks to something called Dennard scaling. That stopped happening in the mid 2000s. Price per transistor, transistor density, and energy efficiency are all continuing to get better exponentially but new semiconductor plants are also going up in price exponentially so more and more companies are dropping out of the race. You can look at the Wikichip page to see how much attrition there's been. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node
- ahartmetz 4y agoHey, performance tuning is fun! You should try it.
- imtringued 4y agoI upgraded from Ivy Bridge to a Ryzen 2700, the difference is extreme. One of those could barely encode a 1080p stream in real time the other one can encode at least eight and probably 16 but I never needed that many.