12 ms·

This graph in the article is pretty fascinating: https://i0.wp.com/semiengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-2.png https://i0.wp.com/semiengineering.com/

by geenew 4y ago

This graph in the article is pretty fascinating: https://i0.wp.com/semiengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-2.png https://i0.wp.com/semiengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/Pic... (not really a png, apparently, but a webp file)

Traubenfuchs 4y ago
More depressing -number of cores will also level off eventually and where does that leave us then? Will we actually have to optimize our code instead of pushing each hello world request through hundreds of function calls? I also assume some niches are actually already 90%+ optimized. Once the cores level off it‘s stagnation here too.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Would the number of cores in a GPU level off? It seems like intensive computing of all sort will migrate to gpgpu programming.
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    Shrinking has almost stopped too and you can only make a chip that big before it runs into other constraints.
    - singularity2001 4y ago
      There is a lot of room for development before the exponential curve can be carried by the next paradigm: at least for desktop computers we are still decades away from case filling 3D "compute cubes".
      - brazzy 4y ago
        It's quite possible that kind of thing has hard limits set by cooling.
        singularity2001 4y ago
        sure but usually before hard limits are reached a new paradigm is ready to take over
    - plasticchris 4y ago
      The wafer scale computing folks would disagree...
      - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
        This is insane. https://www.eetimes.com/powering-and-cooling-a-wafer-scale-die/ https://www.eetimes.com/powering-and-cooling-a-wafer-scale-d...
  - ummonk 4y ago
    Seems like the latest Nvidia GPUs aren't really an improvement over the previous ones, but just bigger and proportionally more expensive. So maybe the leveling off in performance is already starting to happen.
    - brokenmachine 4y ago
      That is not true. The 4090 uses less power than a 3080ti while being 63% faster. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-founders-edition/39.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-f... , and 45% better performance than a 3090ti while using 2% less power (at 4k). https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-founders-edition/32.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-f... Can't find the link now, but I saw a youtube video where they did an analysis of it at different wattage limits and it performed very nicely. 4090 draws a lot of power, but Nvidia has just chosen to work at the diminishing returns end of the curve. It's a halo product for people who will pay for the top of the range. I mean, look at the price!
- mschuster91 4y ago
  I'd guess we get more hardware acceleration. In classic computers (PCs, laptops, servers), for stuff like audio/video codecs, that's been available for decades, but I'd say the next big push will be ethernet/wifi accelerators that do stuff like checksum calculation/verification, VLAN tagging or even protocol-level stuff like TLS in the chip itself - currently, that's all gated for expensive cards [1], I'd expect that stuff to become mainstream over the next few years. Another big part will be acceleration for disk-to-card data transfer [2] - at the moment, data is being shifted from the disk to RAM to GPU/other compute card. Allowing disks to interface with compute cards will be a lot of work - basically, there needs to be a parallel filesystem reader implementation on the disk itself, on the DMA controller or in the GPU, which is a lot of effort to get done right with most modern and complex filesystems - but in anything requiring high performance removing the CPU bottleneck should be well worth the effort. Mobile is going to be more interesting because of power, space and thermal constraints and a lot of optimization already being done because unlike on classic computers vendors couldn't just go and use brute force to get better performance, and there is a bit of an upper cap on chip/package size as well. Probably we'll see even more consolidation towards larger SoCs that also do all the radio communication stuff if not on the same chip then at least in the same package, so the end game there is one single package that does everything and all that's needed on the board are RF amplifiers and power management. All the radio stuff will move to SDR sooner or later, allowing for far faster adoption of higher bandwidth links and with it, a reduce in power consumption as the power-expensive RF parts have to be powered on for less time to deliver the same amount of data. [1] https://docs.nvidia.com/networking/display/FREEBSDv370/Kernel+Transport+Layer+Security+%28kTLS%29+Offloads https://docs.nvidia.com/networking/display/FREEBSDv370/Kerne... [2] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gpudirect-storage/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gpudirect-storage/
  - rjsw 4y ago
    Network offload has been available in low-cost controllers for a long time, TLS isn't common though. It could be better if network controllers just had a documented local CPU, then the firmware could be extended over time to add new features.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  What if aliens show up and they are thousands of years ahead of us and they don’t have anything much more powerful than an i9 running their UFO?
  - ars 4y ago
    Then that pretty much spells the end of true AI. We may shift to computers that operate off of chemical signals instead of electrical ones - like the brain.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Who knows what sort of tech aliens would have? I don't think this whole foray into general purpose computing was necessarily pre-destined. Maybe their whole system could look more like a bunch of strung-together ASICs. "You made your computers drastically less efficient so that anyone could program them? Why would you want your soldier-forms and worker-forms to program computers? Just have the engineer-forms place the transistors correctly in the first place, duh."
    - rl3 4y ago
      >Who knows what sort of tech aliens would have? I don't think this whole foray into general purpose computing was necessarily pre-destined. It's sometimes fun to think that technology is a function of the intelligence that creates it. What if the aliens have some vastly different perception of reality than us? Things we consider obvious to them may not be, and vice versa. The underlying desires and motivation different. Humans for example, often tend to invent things for the sake of it. Imagine a species that doesn't do that. Or an organic FTL drive conjured into existence over eons via distributed intelligence. Weird.
      - checkyoursudo 4y ago
        > Or an organic FTL drive conjured into existence over eons via distributed intelligence. Weird. E.g., What if the first aliens to find us are hyperintelligent slime molds, whose entire existence is predicated on finding the shortest distance between two points in higher-dimensional space and then traveling there to see what there is to eat?
- pbazarnik 4y ago
  The "cores" are becoming more specialized and optimized for domain specific tasks. Compiler technology advancements are needed to take advantage of such heterogenous architectures in a transparent way. LLVM MLIR started that already.[1,2] The alternative is being stuck with each silicon vendor's proprietary solutions like CUDA. [1] https://mlir.llvm.org/ https://mlir.llvm.org/ [2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/04/compiling_the_future/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/04/compiling_the_future/
- tyingq 4y ago
  There's also ideas like the Mill processor. Though it's hard to avoid comparisons to Itanium, and how a mountain of money still didn't produce a compiler that could unlock what initially sounded like a better ecosystem.
- Frost1x 4y ago
  >More depressing -number of cores will also level off eventually and where does that leave us then? Short of breakthroughs (e.g. quantum and currently unknowns), the only clear path is less generalized architectures and more specialized chips. As you move more towards ASICs from general architectures you get improved performance, reduced power, and so on. We've lived in the era of software where hardware was abundant and cheaper than an engineers time. Throw more hardware at it and make sure you have generally optimal algorithms in most your run paths. That's going to change more and more and I suspect we're going to have to start rethinking or redeveloping some layers of abstraction between current software and hardware. As it stands now we're building more and more complex things atop weaker intermediary layers of abstraction to save time and meet budgets but that's going to have to be revisited in the future and the inefficiency debts we've been building up will need to be paid down. Clear code will become less of a top priority when clever optimizations can be added in that may not be so clear. We're still many many year away from this but that's my prediction.
  - urthor 4y ago
    Not necessarily a problematic trend. It takes thousands and thousands of engineers to produce a general purpose chip. It takes... one smart lady to optimize a widely used library for FPGA acceleration.
- duped 4y ago
  The metric is performance per watt per dollar. At the moment the fact is that the amount of compute available per watt dollar is ridiculously cheap, crypto not withstanding. We are not limited by compute resources but by business practices. The organizational cost of software design is where the next gains are, not technological.
- stn_za 4y ago
  Can't wait. People should be so ashamed that what's basically an IRC client (Slack) requires more than 4GB of ram and so many cores. Laziness. Truly.
MereInterest 4y ago
Back in grad school, one of the analysis programs I used dated back to the mid 70s. The original paper gave a performance metric for a test program, which I compared to the runtime on a Chromebook running Linux. I was curious how closely that scaled with Moore's Law, and computed "initial_release + (1.5 years)*log2(initial_runtime/current_runtime)". That is, assuming that the change in program speed has increased due to hardware improvements, and those hardware improvements follow Dennard scaling, what year is it? This (admittedly very rough) measurement ended up giving 2003. It was wrong by over a decade from the actual date, but correctly gave the date at which clock frequencies stopped improving.
nullifidian 4y ago
Not sure if it's exactly accurate with the plateauing trend -- single-threaded performance almost doubled in the last 5 years.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  It's a log scale graph, it shows a doubling. The performance just isn't increasing as fast as it was before.
  - hansel_der 4y ago
    yea, buying a pc in the early intel era was a somewhat double edgded sword because you knew that the next generation would come out in a year or so and it would probably have more than double the performance.
    - Nomentatus 4y ago
      For many years my friends and I had a rule that we wouldn't buy a new computer until it offered at least 4X the speed of our old one. We didn't have to wait all that long.
mrandish 4y ago
My entire career in computers spans the 40 years in that graph. The constant leaps in fundamental speed were exhilarating and kind of addictive for technologists like myself. As the rate of progress has fallen off over the past decade it's been sad to see the end of an era. I'm sure speeds and capabilities will continue to increase, albeit much more gradually, but significant gains are going to come slower, harder and at greater cost. The burden will have to be shouldered by system architects and programmers in finding clever ways to squeeze out net gains under increasingly severe fundamental constraints (density, leakage, thermals, etc). Back when I started programming as a teen in 1980 with 4k of RAM and ~1 Mhz 8-bit CPUs, knowledge of the hardware underneath the code and low-level assembly language skills were highly valuable. Over the years, the ability to think in instruction cycles and register addressing modes grew anachronistically quaint. Now I suspect those kinds of specialized 'down-to-the-metal' optimization skills may see a resurgence in value.
- zaptrem 4y ago
  This graph shows transistors basically maintaining pace and completely disregards multi-core performance. Of course single core perf will rise more slowly when a chip now has 8-64x as many cores.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    Which is great if you have a traditional server application servicing a lot of independent requests, or giant linear equations that can be solved in parallel. OTOH, the graph has an amadal's law section, which for many tasks is pretty out of steam (aka desktop web browsing/javascript JIT/etc). I'm not going to be so stupid as to say 8 cores should be enough for anyone (while attached to a machine with 128) but you have to wonder if the stable diffusion style apps running on your desktop are going to be mainstream, or isolated to the few who choose to _need_ them as a hobby or a smaller part of the public that uses them for commercial success. AKA, I can utilize just about every core i'm given with parallel compiles, or rendering a 4K video, but I'm pretty sure i'm the only one in my immediate family that needs that. My wife in the past might have done some simulation work, but these days the heaviest thing she runs on her PC is office products. This really gets back at the Arm big.little thing, where you really want 99% of your application usage to run on the big cores. The little cores only exist for background/latency insensitive tasks, and the odd case where the problem actually can utilize a large number of parallel cores and needs to maximize efficiency in the power envelope to maximize computation. AKA throw a lot of lower power transistors at the people rendering video/etc, and leave them powered off most of the time. AKA, put another way, the common use case is a few big powerful cores for normal use, playing games, whatever with one or two high efficiency processors for everything else and a pile of dark silicon for the rare application that actually can utilize dozens of cores because its trivial to parallelize and doesn't work better being offloaded to a GPU. I suspect long term intel was probably right with larrabee, they were just a decade or two early. So, economically I don't see people buying machines with a couple hundred cores that sit dark most of the time. Which will drive the price up even more, and make them less popular.
causi 4y ago
This trend of browsers to increasingly lie to me about what I'm looking at is infuriating.
- modeless 4y ago
  The URL is a lie but that's not the browser's fault. It's correctly showing you the URL that you requested and the server responded to. If you save the file locally the browser will give it the correct extension.
- q-big 4y ago
  > This trend of browsers to increasingly lie to me about what I'm looking at is infuriating. The browser does not lie to you, it just does not show the MIME type of the content. I do agree that it would make sense that the browser shows the MIME type of the content that is currently displayed, but this is opposition to the current fashion (in particular pioneered by Apple) of "simplifying" everything.
  - deathanatos 4y ago
    > The browser does not lie to you, it just does not show the MIME type of the content. In this particular case, Firefox does: > Picture1-2.png (WEBP Image, 1054 × 593 pixels) is the title on the tab. (The ".png" comes from the URL, as a sibling notes.) Chrome does not.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
samstave 4y ago
where the heck is Transmeta ??? intel was so afraid of them in 1997 Obv AMD was the true and once... but there was a lot of Transmeta-fear back then too
- jecel 4y ago
  Transmeta announced their first product, the Crusoe processor, in 2000. Before then they were highly secretive and nobody knew what area they would compete in. Intel was indeed worried about the laptop market when the Crusoe came out, but quickly adopted the voltage and frequency scaling into their own processors negating some of Transmeta's key technical advantages. Meanwhile, IBM changed directions as a third party fab (they dropped bulk CMOS to focus on SiliconOnInsulator) leaving Transmeta without a product to sell until they could find a new fab and design their next generation product for that.
amelius 4y ago
How is it that the number of transistors still grows exponentially, while the power use has plateaued?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- eru 4y ago
  Each transistor uses less power?
  - amelius 4y ago
    Exponentially less.
- Swenrekcah 4y ago
  I think I can say the following. Smaller transistors mean fewer electrons that go in and out every clock cycle, so less power per transistor. Higher clock frequency means more cycles per second, that is more electrons spent per second thus higher power consumption. Since clock frequency has stabilised and the total area of a chip is I think not much larger than before, it is expected to see the power consumption stabilising. I also believe I read somewhere that one of the reasons clock frequency stoped increasing was that the power consumption became too high for the chips to handle the thermal dissipation.
joshspankit 4y ago
I wonder how much of that flattening is because chips are now hovering just under the 5GHz/6Ghz wifi frequencies. Yes we have techniques that help them avoid each other, but it seems like it would be enough of a tech and PR hassle that companies wouldn’t bother.
- hansel_der 4y ago
  pretty sure it has something to do with speed of light divided by clock speed
  - kloch 4y ago
    Pretty sure it has everything to do with heat dissipation
    - hansel_der 4y ago
      probably true as well. also iirc the actual clock of the logic gates is a factor above the 'operations clock'
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    I hadn’t even considered that there is a physical limitation. I’m too lazy to look it up now, but when I first read this I feel like the math said electrons can move at maximum 5cm in a single 5GHz clock cycle? That’s wild.
    - hansel_der 4y ago
      the eletrons do not have to 'move' the entire way for transfer of information because they will push the already present ones further.
      - joshspankit 4y ago
        Well yes, but that’s an academic difference unless you’re stating that they can transfer information faster than light.
jdthedisciple 4y ago
interesting, so basically since 2010 no all-to-significant progress has really been made despite the scaling in logical processor count. This is considering the vast majority of software basically still uses only a single core
- dspillett 4y ago
  > the vast majority of software basically still uses only a single core And that which does use multiple cores, sometimes only scales well to a few because then other bottlenecks† start to become most significant. Many things are not so “embarrassingly parallelisable” that they can easily take full advantage of the power available from expanding the number of processing units available beyond a certain point. -- [†] things no longer being “friendly” to the amount or arrangement of shared L2/L3 cache as the amount of threads grow causing more cache-thrashing, hitting other memory bandwidth issues, or for really large data you might be considering issues as far down as the IO subsystem or network.
andy_ppp 4y ago
I’d love to see how GPUs fit into this picture; are we getting more transistors on a die but designs are not getting much faster?
abbeyj 4y ago
You might like https://github.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-trend-data https://github.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-trend-data

by geenew 4y ago

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

More depressing -number of cores will also level off eventually and where does that leave us then? Will we actually have to optimize our code instead of pushing each hello world request through hundreds of function calls? I also assume some niches are actually already 90%+ optimized. Once the cores level off it‘s stagnation here too.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
joe_the_user 4y ago
Would the number of cores in a GPU level off? It seems like intensive computing of all sort will migrate to gpgpu programming.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Shrinking has almost stopped too and you can only make a chip that big before it runs into other constraints.
  - singularity2001 4y ago
    There is a lot of room for development before the exponential curve can be carried by the next paradigm: at least for desktop computers we are still decades away from case filling 3D "compute cubes".
    - brazzy 4y ago
      It's quite possible that kind of thing has hard limits set by cooling.
      - singularity2001 4y ago
        sure but usually before hard limits are reached a new paradigm is ready to take over
  - plasticchris 4y ago
    The wafer scale computing folks would disagree...
    - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
      This is insane. https://www.eetimes.com/powering-and-cooling-a-wafer-scale-die/ https://www.eetimes.com/powering-and-cooling-a-wafer-scale-d...
- ummonk 4y ago
  Seems like the latest Nvidia GPUs aren't really an improvement over the previous ones, but just bigger and proportionally more expensive. So maybe the leveling off in performance is already starting to happen.
  - brokenmachine 4y ago
    That is not true. The 4090 uses less power than a 3080ti while being 63% faster. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-founders-edition/39.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-f... , and 45% better performance than a 3090ti while using 2% less power (at 4k). https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-founders-edition/32.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-f... Can't find the link now, but I saw a youtube video where they did an analysis of it at different wattage limits and it performed very nicely. 4090 draws a lot of power, but Nvidia has just chosen to work at the diminishing returns end of the curve. It's a halo product for people who will pay for the top of the range. I mean, look at the price!
mschuster91 4y ago
I'd guess we get more hardware acceleration. In classic computers (PCs, laptops, servers), for stuff like audio/video codecs, that's been available for decades, but I'd say the next big push will be ethernet/wifi accelerators that do stuff like checksum calculation/verification, VLAN tagging or even protocol-level stuff like TLS in the chip itself - currently, that's all gated for expensive cards [1], I'd expect that stuff to become mainstream over the next few years. Another big part will be acceleration for disk-to-card data transfer [2] - at the moment, data is being shifted from the disk to RAM to GPU/other compute card. Allowing disks to interface with compute cards will be a lot of work - basically, there needs to be a parallel filesystem reader implementation on the disk itself, on the DMA controller or in the GPU, which is a lot of effort to get done right with most modern and complex filesystems - but in anything requiring high performance removing the CPU bottleneck should be well worth the effort. Mobile is going to be more interesting because of power, space and thermal constraints and a lot of optimization already being done because unlike on classic computers vendors couldn't just go and use brute force to get better performance, and there is a bit of an upper cap on chip/package size as well. Probably we'll see even more consolidation towards larger SoCs that also do all the radio communication stuff if not on the same chip then at least in the same package, so the end game there is one single package that does everything and all that's needed on the board are RF amplifiers and power management. All the radio stuff will move to SDR sooner or later, allowing for far faster adoption of higher bandwidth links and with it, a reduce in power consumption as the power-expensive RF parts have to be powered on for less time to deliver the same amount of data. [1] https://docs.nvidia.com/networking/display/FREEBSDv370/Kernel+Transport+Layer+Security+%28kTLS%29+Offloads https://docs.nvidia.com/networking/display/FREEBSDv370/Kerne... [2] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gpudirect-storage/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gpudirect-storage/
- rjsw 4y ago
  Network offload has been available in low-cost controllers for a long time, TLS isn't common though. It could be better if network controllers just had a documented local CPU, then the firmware could be extended over time to add new features.
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
What if aliens show up and they are thousands of years ahead of us and they don’t have anything much more powerful than an i9 running their UFO?
- ars 4y ago
  Then that pretty much spells the end of true AI. We may shift to computers that operate off of chemical signals instead of electrical ones - like the brain.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Who knows what sort of tech aliens would have? I don't think this whole foray into general purpose computing was necessarily pre-destined. Maybe their whole system could look more like a bunch of strung-together ASICs. "You made your computers drastically less efficient so that anyone could program them? Why would you want your soldier-forms and worker-forms to program computers? Just have the engineer-forms place the transistors correctly in the first place, duh."
  - rl3 4y ago
    >Who knows what sort of tech aliens would have? I don't think this whole foray into general purpose computing was necessarily pre-destined. It's sometimes fun to think that technology is a function of the intelligence that creates it. What if the aliens have some vastly different perception of reality than us? Things we consider obvious to them may not be, and vice versa. The underlying desires and motivation different. Humans for example, often tend to invent things for the sake of it. Imagine a species that doesn't do that. Or an organic FTL drive conjured into existence over eons via distributed intelligence. Weird.
    - checkyoursudo 4y ago
      > Or an organic FTL drive conjured into existence over eons via distributed intelligence. Weird. E.g., What if the first aliens to find us are hyperintelligent slime molds, whose entire existence is predicated on finding the shortest distance between two points in higher-dimensional space and then traveling there to see what there is to eat?
pbazarnik 4y ago
The "cores" are becoming more specialized and optimized for domain specific tasks. Compiler technology advancements are needed to take advantage of such heterogenous architectures in a transparent way. LLVM MLIR started that already.[1,2] The alternative is being stuck with each silicon vendor's proprietary solutions like CUDA. [1] https://mlir.llvm.org/ https://mlir.llvm.org/ [2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/04/compiling_the_future/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/04/compiling_the_future/
tyingq 4y ago
There's also ideas like the Mill processor. Though it's hard to avoid comparisons to Itanium, and how a mountain of money still didn't produce a compiler that could unlock what initially sounded like a better ecosystem.
Frost1x 4y ago
>More depressing -number of cores will also level off eventually and where does that leave us then? Short of breakthroughs (e.g. quantum and currently unknowns), the only clear path is less generalized architectures and more specialized chips. As you move more towards ASICs from general architectures you get improved performance, reduced power, and so on. We've lived in the era of software where hardware was abundant and cheaper than an engineers time. Throw more hardware at it and make sure you have generally optimal algorithms in most your run paths. That's going to change more and more and I suspect we're going to have to start rethinking or redeveloping some layers of abstraction between current software and hardware. As it stands now we're building more and more complex things atop weaker intermediary layers of abstraction to save time and meet budgets but that's going to have to be revisited in the future and the inefficiency debts we've been building up will need to be paid down. Clear code will become less of a top priority when clever optimizations can be added in that may not be so clear. We're still many many year away from this but that's my prediction.
- urthor 4y ago
  Not necessarily a problematic trend. It takes thousands and thousands of engineers to produce a general purpose chip. It takes... one smart lady to optimize a widely used library for FPGA acceleration.
duped 4y ago
The metric is performance per watt per dollar. At the moment the fact is that the amount of compute available per watt dollar is ridiculously cheap, crypto not withstanding. We are not limited by compute resources but by business practices. The organizational cost of software design is where the next gains are, not technological.
stn_za 4y ago
Can't wait. People should be so ashamed that what's basically an IRC client (Slack) requires more than 4GB of ram and so many cores. Laziness. Truly.

MereInterest 4y ago

Back in grad school, one of the analysis programs I used dated back to the mid 70s. The original paper gave a performance metric for a test program, which I compared to the runtime on a Chromebook running Linux. I was curious how closely that scaled with Moore's Law, and computed "initial_release + (1.5 years)*log2(initial_runtime/current_runtime)". That is, assuming that the change in program speed has increased due to hardware improvements, and those hardware improvements follow Dennard scaling, what year is it? This (admittedly very rough) measurement ended up giving 2003. It was wrong by over a decade from the actual date, but correctly gave the date at which clock frequencies stopped improving.

nullifidian 4y ago

Not sure if it's exactly accurate with the plateauing trend -- single-threaded performance almost doubled in the last 5 years.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
It's a log scale graph, it shows a doubling. The performance just isn't increasing as fast as it was before.
- hansel_der 4y ago
  yea, buying a pc in the early intel era was a somewhat double edgded sword because you knew that the next generation would come out in a year or so and it would probably have more than double the performance.
  - Nomentatus 4y ago
    For many years my friends and I had a rule that we wouldn't buy a new computer until it offered at least 4X the speed of our old one. We didn't have to wait all that long.

mrandish 4y ago

My entire career in computers spans the 40 years in that graph. The constant leaps in fundamental speed were exhilarating and kind of addictive for technologists like myself. As the rate of progress has fallen off over the past decade it's been sad to see the end of an era. I'm sure speeds and capabilities will continue to increase, albeit much more gradually, but significant gains are going to come slower, harder and at greater cost. The burden will have to be shouldered by system architects and programmers in finding clever ways to squeeze out net gains under increasingly severe fundamental constraints (density, leakage, thermals, etc). Back when I started programming as a teen in 1980 with 4k of RAM and ~1 Mhz 8-bit CPUs, knowledge of the hardware underneath the code and low-level assembly language skills were highly valuable. Over the years, the ability to think in instruction cycles and register addressing modes grew anachronistically quaint. Now I suspect those kinds of specialized 'down-to-the-metal' optimization skills may see a resurgence in value.

zaptrem 4y ago
This graph shows transistors basically maintaining pace and completely disregards multi-core performance. Of course single core perf will rise more slowly when a chip now has 8-64x as many cores.
- StillBored 4y ago
  Which is great if you have a traditional server application servicing a lot of independent requests, or giant linear equations that can be solved in parallel. OTOH, the graph has an amadal's law section, which for many tasks is pretty out of steam (aka desktop web browsing/javascript JIT/etc). I'm not going to be so stupid as to say 8 cores should be enough for anyone (while attached to a machine with 128) but you have to wonder if the stable diffusion style apps running on your desktop are going to be mainstream, or isolated to the few who choose to _need_ them as a hobby or a smaller part of the public that uses them for commercial success. AKA, I can utilize just about every core i'm given with parallel compiles, or rendering a 4K video, but I'm pretty sure i'm the only one in my immediate family that needs that. My wife in the past might have done some simulation work, but these days the heaviest thing she runs on her PC is office products. This really gets back at the Arm big.little thing, where you really want 99% of your application usage to run on the big cores. The little cores only exist for background/latency insensitive tasks, and the odd case where the problem actually can utilize a large number of parallel cores and needs to maximize efficiency in the power envelope to maximize computation. AKA throw a lot of lower power transistors at the people rendering video/etc, and leave them powered off most of the time. AKA, put another way, the common use case is a few big powerful cores for normal use, playing games, whatever with one or two high efficiency processors for everything else and a pile of dark silicon for the rare application that actually can utilize dozens of cores because its trivial to parallelize and doesn't work better being offloaded to a GPU. I suspect long term intel was probably right with larrabee, they were just a decade or two early. So, economically I don't see people buying machines with a couple hundred cores that sit dark most of the time. Which will drive the price up even more, and make them less popular.

causi 4y ago

This trend of browsers to increasingly lie to me about what I'm looking at is infuriating.

modeless 4y ago
The URL is a lie but that's not the browser's fault. It's correctly showing you the URL that you requested and the server responded to. If you save the file locally the browser will give it the correct extension.
q-big 4y ago
> This trend of browsers to increasingly lie to me about what I'm looking at is infuriating. The browser does not lie to you, it just does not show the MIME type of the content. I do agree that it would make sense that the browser shows the MIME type of the content that is currently displayed, but this is opposition to the current fashion (in particular pioneered by Apple) of "simplifying" everything.
- deathanatos 4y ago
  > The browser does not lie to you, it just does not show the MIME type of the content. In this particular case, Firefox does: > Picture1-2.png (WEBP Image, 1054 × 593 pixels) is the title on the tab. (The ".png" comes from the URL, as a sibling notes.) Chrome does not.

deleted 4y ago

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samstave 4y ago

where the heck is Transmeta ??? intel was so afraid of them in 1997 Obv AMD was the true and once... but there was a lot of Transmeta-fear back then too

jecel 4y ago
Transmeta announced their first product, the Crusoe processor, in 2000. Before then they were highly secretive and nobody knew what area they would compete in. Intel was indeed worried about the laptop market when the Crusoe came out, but quickly adopted the voltage and frequency scaling into their own processors negating some of Transmeta's key technical advantages. Meanwhile, IBM changed directions as a third party fab (they dropped bulk CMOS to focus on SiliconOnInsulator) leaving Transmeta without a product to sell until they could find a new fab and design their next generation product for that.

amelius 4y ago

How is it that the number of transistors still grows exponentially, while the power use has plateaued?

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eru 4y ago
Each transistor uses less power?
- amelius 4y ago
  Exponentially less.
Swenrekcah 4y ago
I think I can say the following. Smaller transistors mean fewer electrons that go in and out every clock cycle, so less power per transistor. Higher clock frequency means more cycles per second, that is more electrons spent per second thus higher power consumption. Since clock frequency has stabilised and the total area of a chip is I think not much larger than before, it is expected to see the power consumption stabilising. I also believe I read somewhere that one of the reasons clock frequency stoped increasing was that the power consumption became too high for the chips to handle the thermal dissipation.

joshspankit 4y ago

I wonder how much of that flattening is because chips are now hovering just under the 5GHz/6Ghz wifi frequencies. Yes we have techniques that help them avoid each other, but it seems like it would be enough of a tech and PR hassle that companies wouldn’t bother.

hansel_der 4y ago
pretty sure it has something to do with speed of light divided by clock speed
- kloch 4y ago
  Pretty sure it has everything to do with heat dissipation
  - hansel_der 4y ago
    probably true as well. also iirc the actual clock of the logic gates is a factor above the 'operations clock'
- joshspankit 4y ago
  I hadn’t even considered that there is a physical limitation. I’m too lazy to look it up now, but when I first read this I feel like the math said electrons can move at maximum 5cm in a single 5GHz clock cycle? That’s wild.
  - hansel_der 4y ago
    the eletrons do not have to 'move' the entire way for transfer of information because they will push the already present ones further.
    - joshspankit 4y ago
      Well yes, but that’s an academic difference unless you’re stating that they can transfer information faster than light.

jdthedisciple 4y ago

interesting, so basically since 2010 no all-to-significant progress has really been made despite the scaling in logical processor count. This is considering the vast majority of software basically still uses only a single core

dspillett 4y ago
> the vast majority of software basically still uses only a single core And that which does use multiple cores, sometimes only scales well to a few because then other bottlenecks† start to become most significant. Many things are not so “embarrassingly parallelisable” that they can easily take full advantage of the power available from expanding the number of processing units available beyond a certain point. -- [†] things no longer being “friendly” to the amount or arrangement of shared L2/L3 cache as the amount of threads grow causing more cache-thrashing, hitting other memory bandwidth issues, or for really large data you might be considering issues as far down as the IO subsystem or network.

andy_ppp 4y ago

I’d love to see how GPUs fit into this picture; are we getting more transistors on a die but designs are not getting much faster?

abbeyj 4y ago

You might like https://github.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-trend-data https://github.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-trend-data